Snoezelen op maat, Wat zijn de mogelijkheden?

Door Miranda Minkenberg

Snoezelen kan ingezet worden als een benaderingswijze om d.m.v. actieve zintuigprikkeling een ingang te vinden in de belevingswereld van de leerlingen met ASS1. Door doelbewust te snoezelen is het mogelijk om de prikkelverwerking te stimuleren of juist af te remmen waar dat nodig is.

Children with autism often do not interact well with the world around them; being unable to understand events in their immediate surroundings and lacking any sense of an ability to control or direct events. This inability to interact inhibits their mental development; precisely the problem that MEDIATE was designed to help overcome.

These experiments explored whether behavioral improvements observed during Snoezelen OT treatment sessions generalized beyond the session to two different settings for a person with moderate intellectual disability, autism and severe challenging behaviors. Experiment 1 explored engagement during a functional task immediately following the treatment sessions while Experiment 2 explored changes in the frequencies of two challenging behaviors on the days after treatment sessions. Investigators found generalization to both post-session engagement as well as to the daily frequency of two challenging behaviors on days following the OT sessions