Sensory integration refers to how people use the information provided by all sensations originating within the body or from the external environment.

Sensory Responsiveness: What’s normal and what isn’t?

Kids with sensory dysfunction have much more trouble with sensory processing. It includes the following symptoms:

• They usually manage many of the following behavioral symptoms, which can interfere with the daily activities and learning.
• Oversensitivity or under-sensitivity to touch, sights, sounds, movements, tastes, and smells.
• High distractibility with problems paying attention and staying focused on a task.
• An unusually high or low activity level.
• Frequent turning out or withdrawing.
• Intense, out of proportion reactions to challenging situations and unfamiliar environments.
• Impulsiveness, with little or no self-control.
• Difficulty transitioning from activity to activator situation to situation.
• Rigidity and inflexibility at times.
• Clumsiness and carelessness.
• Discomfort in group situations.
• Social or emotional difficulties.
• Developmental and learning delays and acting silly or immature
• Awkwardness, insecurity, or feeling “stupid or weird.”
• Trouble handling frustration, a tendency to tantrum longer and more intensely than other children and more difficulty returning to a calm state.
• Problems transitioning from an alert, active state to a calm rested state.

TREATMENT

• Sensory activities can be facilitating, inhibiting or regulatory/ modulating, depending on the quality, intensity, and duration of the stimuli.
• The therapist provides light touch, textures, shapes or deep touch pressure.

Intervention related to sensory discrimination

• Many of the techniques used for intervention in modulation also apply in discrimination.
• To help a child develop appropriate tactile discrimination, the child may discriminate size, shape, texture, location, and quality of a verity of tactile stimuli to various areas of the body with and without vision.