Sensory integration Therapy (SI)
Sensory integration focuses primarily on three senses — vestibular (i.e emotion, balance), tactile (i.e., touch), and proprioception (e.g., joints, ligaments). Many techniques are used to stimulate these senses in order to
normalize them. Train children's ability in sensory integration through different swinging, balancing, juggling, sucking, breathing and climbing activities that stimulate the vestibular and proprioceptive system in the brain, reduce the blocking of various sensory input, improve muscles strength, reinforce communication and learning ability and enhance children's attention development.Many autistic children have unusual sensitivities to sounds, sights, touch, taste, and smells. High-pitched intermittent sounds, such as fire alarms or school bells, may be painful to autistic children. Scratchy fabrics may also be intolerable, and some children have visual sensitivities. They are troubled by the flickering of fluorescent lights. If the child often has tantrums in large supermarkets, it is possible that he/she has severe sensory oversensitivity. Sensory sensitivities are highly variable in autism, from mild to severe. In some children, the sensitivities are mostly auditory, and in others, mostly visual. It is likely that many individuals who remain non-verbal have both auditory and visual processing problems, and sensory input may be scrambled. Even though a pure tone hearing test may imply normal hearing, the child may have difficulty hearing auditory details and hard consonant sounds. Some children have very high pain thresholds (i.e., be insensitive to pain), whereas others have very low pain thresholds. Interventions such as sensory integration can be used to help normalize their senses, too.