After spending the previous week looking at physiological monitoring and biofeedback, I started to realise that there is an important difference between simply collecting information from the body and designing technology that can actually respond to it. My earlier research into adaptive VR had already introduced the idea that an environment could change according to information such as heart rate, but I had still been thinking about this mainly through the lens of VR.
I therefore wanted to understand what happens after a physiological change has been detected. If a wearable can identify that something within the body is changing, how could that information become part of a system that responds to the individual in real time?
One of the most useful papers for developing this was Wei et al. (2026), Seamless Human–Computer Interaction Enabled by Wearable Biointerfaces and Intelligent Systems. The paper looks at the development of wearable biointerfaces alongside artificial intelligence and adaptive human-computer interaction.
What interested me most was that the wearable is not described simply as a device for collecting health data. The paper considers systems where physiological and movement signals are captured from the body, interpreted through intelligent algorithms and then used to inform different forms of feedback. The authors describe wearable technologies as increasingly supporting perception, decision-making and response, rather than only passively recording information.
This helped me see that the sensor itself is only one part of a much larger system.
The most useful idea for my project is closed-loop feedback. Rather than collecting a signal and ending there, the system can continue responding to what happens next.
The process can be understood as physiological information being sensed, interpreted by the system, translated into feedback and then followed by another human response which can be sensed again. In other words, the interaction becomes continuous rather than one-directional.
For my project, this is important because an autistic traveller's needs may change throughout an airport journey. A system that only records that somebody's heart rate has increased does not necessarily provide support. A closed-loop system introduces the possibility that the technology could use that information as one part of deciding whether some form of feedback or intervention might be useful, while continuing to monitor what happens afterwards.
This shifts my thinking from biosensing towards bioresponsive technology.
This distinction feels important to establish before I develop the project further. Biosensing is concerned with collecting physiological information from the body. Bioresponsive technology goes a stage further by considering how that information might influence what the system does.
This means that designing the wearable is not only a question of which sensor I use. I also need to think about how the information is interpreted, what kind of change would cause the system to respond, what form that response might take and whether the individual actually wants that response at that moment.
Wei et al. discuss adaptive feedback across different sensory channels, including non-visual and multimodal forms of interaction. This is particularly interesting because it means that the eventual response does not have to be a visual screen or a VR environment. The technology could potentially communicate through tactile, auditory, thermal or combined forms of feedback depending on the system and the user.
This has opened the project up considerably. I had previously been asking whether VR could create an individually controlled sensory environment. I am now beginning to think much more broadly about what form of response would actually be most appropriate during live airport travel.
Airports are constantly changing environments. Somebody may move from a quiet check-in area into security, then into a crowded departure lounge, experience a delay, have a gate change and later enter an aircraft. The sensory and cognitive demands are therefore not fixed throughout the journey.
This connects directly with my primary research, where support needs appeared to change when journeys became unpredictable or when the environment became more difficult to regulate within. A responsive system therefore feels more relevant than a single fixed intervention because the support could potentially change alongside the situation.