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This paper aims to investigate if a sensory intervention of moderate pressure touch of children with sensory processing disorder (SPD) affects sleep behaviours and sensory processing behaviours.

A total of 50 children, aged 5–11 years with both SPD and sleep difficulties in Israel, were randomly divided into an experimental and a control group, nonblinded. Participants in the experimental group received three weeks of nightly massage by their parents, with a baseline week on both ends. Parents filled out questionnaires reporting on sensory and sleep behaviours and filled out a nightly sleep log. Parents determined outcome goals using goal attainment scoring. The assessment tools used were the short sensory profile and the child sleep habits questionnaire (Dunn, 1999; Owens et al., 2000).

Significant improvement was found in the total and subgroup scores of sleep participation measures including sleep onset, sleep anxiety, parasomnias, sleep duration, daytime sleepiness, as well as the total sleep score (F (1,48) = 24.71, p < 0.001).

Results of this study suggest that consistent application of moderate pressure touch as advised or trained by an occupational therapist may be used in clinical practice to improve sleep participation in children with SPD.

Cognitive computing is part of AI and cognitive applications consists of cognitive services, which are building blocks of the cognitive systems. These applications mimic the human brain functions, for example, recognize the speaker, sense the tone of the text. On this paper, we present the similarities of these with human cognitive functions. We establish a framework which gathers cognitive functions into nine intentional processes from the substructures of the human brain. The framework, underpins human cognitive functions, and categorizes cognitive computing functions into the functional hierarchy, through which we present the functional similarities between cognitive service and human cognitive functions to illustrate what kind of functions are cognitive in the computing. The results from the comparison of the functional hierarchy of cognitive functions are consistent with cognitive computing literature. Thus, the functional hierarchy allows us to find the type of cognition and reach the comparability between the applications.

The assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in childhood has two essential aspects: the identification of the risk (under 30 months of age) and the definition of a diagnosis that takes into account its core areas as well as further non-specific aspects. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach that considers the combination of clinical evaluation with the use of tools that analyse the various levels of the child’s functioning as fundamental.

The comprehensive assessment at the Institute of Ortofonologia in Rome provides the ADOS-2 and the Leiter-R for the evaluation of the symptomatology, the severity level, the non-verbal cognitive functioning and the fluid reasoning; the TCE and the UOI are used to identify, respectively, the child’s emotional skills and the ability to understand the intentions of others, as precursors of the theory of mind. Within this assessment, the Brief-P, the Short Sensory Profile and the RBS are also included for the evaluation of executive functions, sensory pattern and of restricted and repetitive behaviours, as observed by parents.

How to define a reliable development profile, which allows to plan a specific intervention calibrated on the potential of the child and on his development trajectory, is described. Two clinical cases are also presented.

The entire process is aimed both at a detailed assessment of the child’s functioning and at identifying a specific therapeutic project and predictive factors for achieving an optimal outcome.

In this paper, an emerging state-of-the-art machine intelligence technique called the Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) is applied to the task of short-term load forecasting (STLF). A HTM Spatial Pooler (HTM-SP) stage is used to continually form sparse distributed representations (SDRs) from a univariate load time series data, a temporal aggregator is used to transform the SDRs into a sequential bivariate representation space and an overlap classifier makes temporal classifications from the bivariate SDRs through time. The comparative performance of HTM on several daily electrical load time series data including the Eunite competition dataset and the Polish power system dataset from 2002 to 2004 are presented. The robustness performance of HTM is also further validated using hourly load data from three more recent electricity markets. The results obtained from experimenting with the Eunite and Polish dataset indicated that HTM will perform better than the existing techniques reported in the literature. In general, the robustness test also shows that the error distribution performance of the proposed HTM technique is positively skewed for most of the years considered and with kurtosis values mostly lower than a base value of 3 indicating a reasonable level of outlier rejections.

Do consumers rate reviews describing other consumers' sensory experience of a product (touch, smell, sight, hear and taste) as helpful or do they rate reviews describing more practical properties (product performance and characteristics/features) as more helpful? What is the effect of review helpfulness on purchase intention? Furthermore, why do consumers perceive sensory and non-sensory reviews differently? This study answers these questions.

The authors analyze 447,792 Amazon reviews and perform a topic modeling analysis to extract the main topics that consumers express in their reviews. Then, the topics were used as regressors to predict the number of consumers who found the review helpful. Finally, a lab experiment was conducted to replicate the results in a more controlled environment to test the serial mediation effect.

Contrary to the overwhelming evidence supporting the positive effects of sensory elicitation in marketing, this study shows that sensory reviews are less likely to be helpful than non-sensory reviews. Moreover, a key reason why sensory reviews are less effective is that they decrease the objective perception of the review, a less objective review then decreases the level of helpfulness, which decreases purchase intention.

This study contributes to the interactive marketing field by investigating customer behavior and interactivity in online shopping sites and to the sensory marketing literature by identifying a boundary condition, the authors’ data suggest that sensory elicitations might not be processed positively by consumers when they are not directly experienced, but instead communicated by another consumer. Moreover, this study indicates how companies can encourage consumers to share more effective and helpful reviews.

Previous research has provided limited evidence on whether and how demographic factors associate with sensory processing patterns (SPP) in adults. This paper aims to examine relationships between SPPs and sociodemographic factors of age, sex, education and ethnicity in healthy adults.

A cross-sectional study design was used. A total of 71 adult participants was recruited from the community, using convenience sampling. Each participant completed the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile (AASP) and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales – short version (DASS-21). Demographic information on age, sex, education and ethnicity was collected. Results were analysed using descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses of covariance (MANCOVA).

SPPs, as measured by the AASP, were significantly correlated to demographic factors of age and education after controlling for emotional distress using the DASS-21. A statistically significant multivariate effect was found across the four dependent variables (low registration, seeking, sensitivity and avoiding) for the age category, F = 6.922, p = 0.009, ηp2 = 0.145, in the presence of a covariate DASS. The education category showed significance only in the seeking domain (p = 0.008, ηp2 = 0.10) after controlling for DASS. There was no significant correlation between SPPs and gender or ethnicity. Results also indicated that mean scores of participants in this study were “similar to most people” as standardised in the AASP.

This was a cross-sectional study with limitations including that the study used a relatively small sample and was based on self-reported healthy participants.

SPPs may correlate with healthy adults’ age and to a lesser extent education. This suggests that it might be helpful to consider such demographic factors when interpreting SPPs in clinical populations, although further research in larger samples is needed to reach firmer conclusions about possible implications of demographic variables.

The findings in this paper add to the growing evidence that suggest that SPPs vary with sociodemographic factors.

At present, there is no research to support teachers’ use of sensory interventions in the classroom. This study aims to investigate the extent to how participation in a sensory processing training session would improve teachers’ competence, confidence and practice towards supporting children with autism.

A pilot study design with mixed qualitative and quantitative methods was used to evaluate the impact of sensory processing training on six teachers who taught at least one child with autism in a mainstream school. The Autism Education Trust Competency Framework and face-to-face semi-structured interviews were completed with participants both pre (Time 1) and post (Time 2) training session.

Quantitative findings presented statistically significant differences (p < 0.05) in results with large effect sizes in the areas of confidence, knowledge, implementing sensory strategies, adjusting sensory environments, reviewing and reflecting. Qualitative data provided by participants corroborated this and indicated a need for further and more detailed training in the area. There was no change in the practice of teachers consulting with pupils about their sensory needs.

This study found that the attendance of teachers at sensory processing training is justified and the promotion of sensory processing training is therefore warranted.

Findings of this pilot study indicate that sensory processing training for teachers does improve competence, confidence and practice towards supporting children with autism. Review of the session to allow more detail, including consulting with the children themselves, is recommended.

An emerging evidence base, and increased awareness of the effects of trauma on the body, advocates a sensory-based approach to treatment with posttraumatic stress and complex trauma survivors. This paper aims to identify, analyse and summarise the empirical evidence for the sensory-based interventions, which occupational therapists are using in the treatment of adult and adolescent trauma survivors.

An integrative review of the literature was undertaken. Both empirical and conceptual papers were included. An inductive approach and constant comparative method were used to understand and synthesise the research.

The literature search yielded 18 papers describing the types of sensory-based interventions used, sensory processing (SP) patterns and the context and evidence for sensory-based occupational therapy practice with trauma survivors. Nine of the studies were empirical and nine were conceptual and review papers. Themes identified included: atypical SP patterns; type of sensory-based intervention used with trauma survivors; and transdisciplinary treatment programmes can reduce the symptoms of trauma.

Sensory-based interventions with adult and adolescent trauma survivors are emerging as promising areas of practice and research in the literature. Although empirical data is limited, the sensory needs of the body in processing trauma experiences is becoming more recognised and are supported by the atypical SP patterns identified in survivors. A sensory-based, transdisciplinary approach to treatment has the potential to be effective in treating the trauma survivor.

With a skill base in sensory integration and occupational analysis, occupational therapists have much to offer the field of trauma studies. This review begins to address the gap in the literature, recommending more rigorous controlled outcome research with larger sample sizes, person-centred studies focussing on the trauma survivor’s perspective and continuing professional development and mentorship for occupational therapists working with this population.

The observation by the authors, based on their extensive experience working in K-8 public schools in the region showed the special needs classrooms catering to children with exceptionalities such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Intellectual Disability (ID) and Emotional Disturbance (ED) are typically makeshift arrangements with no consideration given to students' unseen sensory needs. A thorough literature review indicates that there are no holistic design guidelines in place to meet the sensory needs of students with ASD, ID and ED. This study seeks to address this gap by providing considerations to meet the sensory needs impacting these students' focus, behavior and classroom engagement with course content and peers.

Sensory design guidelines were established utilizing a qualitative method, providing a foundation for the development of classroom prototypes that address the sensory needs of students with ASD, ID and ED.

The new guidelines, which correlated interior design strategies with the sensory needs of children with ASD, ID and ED, and the resulting prototypes provide a basis for the further development of design standards and takes designers closer to creating more conducive and inclusive environments.

This study reinforced the belief that these recommendations should be considered in the school-wide design. Many students can be included with their typical peers for all or part of their school day if space has been designed to accommodate their differences.

This study bridges the gap while documenting the correlation between design factors and sensory needs of students with exceptionalities, in this case, ASD, ID and ED.