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?

Wei et al. — Wearable Biointerfaces and Intelligent Systems

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 Closed-Loop 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.

Biosensing and Bioresponsive Technology Are Not the Same

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.

Why This Matters for an Airport

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.

However, this does not mean that the system should automatically take control. Independence has repeatedly emerged within my project as being connected to choice and autonomy rather than simply completing everything without support. Any closed-loop system I develop would therefore need to preserve the traveller's ability to decide whether feedback is useful, alter it or disengage from it completely.

An Important Limitation

This research also makes the limitations of biosensing much more important. Physiological information cannot tell the system exactly what somebody is experiencing. An increase in heart rate could be connected to anxiety or sensory stress, but it could also be caused by walking quickly through the airport, carrying luggage, excitement or another physical or emotional response.

The system therefore cannot simply operate as:

high heart rate = overload = intervention.

Instead, physiological information would need to be interpreted alongside individual baseline, context and other information. The value of the biosignal is not that it diagnoses sensory overload, but that it may provide another piece of information about a changing physiological state.

This feels particularly important as I move further into the technological side of the project because I do not want the concept to become more technologically ambitious while becoming less human-centred.

What This Changes in My Project

This paper has helped me move away from thinking about one piece of technology as the solution. I am beginning to see the project as a connected system made up of sensing, interpretation and response.

The biggest shift is that VR no longer needs to sit at the centre of the project. My earlier VR research is still useful because it demonstrated how an environment could respond to physiological information, but Wei et al. shows that the same principle can exist across a much wider range of wearable and responsive technologies.

The question I want to carry forward is therefore becoming:

How could physiological information become part of a responsive support system without removing control from the autistic traveller?

Key Terminology

Biosensing — collecting physiological or behavioural information from the body through sensors.

Wearable biointerface — a wearable interface that captures information from the body and allows it to become part of an interaction with a technological system.

Closed-loop feedback — a continuous process where information is sensed, interpreted, responded to and then measured again.

Adaptive feedback — feedback that changes according to information being collected from the user or their interaction with the system.

Multimodal sensing — combining more than one source of physiological, movement or behavioural information rather than relying on a single signal.

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) — the study and design of how people interact with technological systems.