Children with impaired sensory regulation demonstrate difficulties across a variety of domains including behaviour, emotion regulation and attention as well as challenges in daily activities. The reportedly large comorbidity between sensory processing difficulties and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and ADHD are notable and thus interventions to improve sensory issues may have wide-ranging effect. Clinical and experimental evidence suggests that sensory processing difficulties are associated with impairments in self-control and regulating behaviour. It is possible that Sensory Integration Therapy, designed to promote self-regulation and optimal arousal, might play a role in the amelioration of cognitive and developmental outcomes . Thus, the aim of the current project is to evaluate an online 6 week, 20 minutes a day manualized series of sensory integration exercises, the ‘BrainCalm’ program, as a potential intervention for sensory processing difficulties in children. Among the advantages of ‘Brain Calm’ are its relatively easy implementation (it can be employed by school SNAs to small groups of children for a period of only 15 minutes a day), its applicability to children with a range of diagnoses (including children with undiagnosed/sub-threshold symptoms) and its applicability to children across development (it has been used in pre-school children up to adolescents).
