As the Brothers of Charity Services team in Lancashire get ready to skydive, fundraising for new state of the art equipment for the Multi-Sensory Room at Lisieux Hall, we will look at what a Multi-Sensory Room or a Multi-Sensory Environment is and some of the advantages that the fundraising will bring to the people we support.
Here at the Brothers of Charity Services in England, we have multi-sensory rooms within the Thingwall Hall and Lisieux Hall sites. The purpose of a Multi-Sensory room is to create both a stimulating and calming atmosphere, used by children and adults of all ages for a number of reasons including therapy, education, recreation and leisure.
Multi-Sensory Rooms feature equipment that provides visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic and olfactory stimulation. Typically, they have bubble tubes, special lighting, a projector to cast slow-moving images or colours around the walls, a mirror ball with spotlight and fibre-optic sprays. Lamps, music or sound equipment and aromatherapy materials may also feature in such environments.
A variety of tangible items can be provided, such as cushions as well as special hanging chairs and massage chairs. Panels with a variety of textures such as rough surfaces, stiff bristles, smooth or contoured mirrors, beads, or soft and squishy items are often also included. Fans, bubble blowers, ball pools, water beds, adaptive swings or vibrating mattresses are also sometimes used in multi-sensory environments.
A Multi-Sensory Room aims to provide a positive failure-free experience, allowing stimulation without the need for verbal skills or calling for specific outcomes, aiming to provide a calm but stimulating environment. The focus is to help anybody that uses the room to gain maximum pleasure from the sensory activity they are involved in.
There are no rules or instructions to follow while using Multi-Sensory Rooms, people can use the environment any way they wish to gain a stimulating experience. People who use Multi-Sensory Rooms are given the opportunity to explore what the room has to offer at their own pace, gradually being introduced to the equipment available in the room, enabling more sensory stimulation.
Recent advances in assistive technology have further enhanced a Multi-Sensory Environment and really allow people to directly control and manipulate their immediate physical surroundings. This will have a knock-on effect on their skills-development, both physical and mental, as well as their leisure-based outcomes.
