The well-being of the sensitive: indoor environment and well-being of people with autism

People with autism deserve more attention to their needs for indoor comfort and well-being. Due to their sensitivity to the 5-senses stimuli, they might perceive the environment differently.

Moreover, some individuals with high-severity autism might have difficulties to properly respond to environmental stimuli, and therefore to adapt to the environmental conditions.

Nevertheless, standards and guidelines typically address average standard populations, and little knowledge is present in the literature about how the indoor environment affects the well-being of people with autism, especially from the indoor environment and comfort engineering perspective.

This knowledge gap has motivated SENSEwellbeing, in which we aim to perform an extensive study on indoor well-being of people with autism.

Objective measurements of environmental parameters, behavioral monitoring and subjective questionnaire surveys will be conducted in a living lab and in field studies, allowing to: 1.

Compare the perception of multi-domain environmental exposures of adults and adolescents with low-severity autism with a control group, in a living lab; 2.

Verify the results conducted in the laboratory in every-day life environments and with individuals with a higher severity of autism; 3. Study adaptive strategies, depending on autism severity and co-morbidities; 4.

Apply and validate a methodology based on third-party observations, to survey the environmental well-being of people with communicative difficulties; 5. Associate the responses to individual characteristics (gender, age, cultural background, health-status).

SENSEwellbeing will be significant for the scientific community, designers and industry: it will offer inputs to extend and refine models, standards and guidelines to be used for the design of comfortable environments for people with autism, as well as to develop home automation systems to improve well-being, safety and autonomy of people with autism and special needs in general.