Positive Technology Journal

Via VRPSYCH mailing list

The Institute of Rural Health at the Idaho State University has announced the following webconferencing session:

Online Communities and Virtual Worlds for Patient and Caregiver Self-Help Groups

Meeting Date and Time: APRIL 20, NOON-1:00 PM MDT (Mountain Daylight Time)
Presenter: John Lester

Online communities offer a unique opportunity for patients and caregivers to share experiences and emotional support with people across the world. John Lester will discuss his experiences with Braintalk Communities (www.braintalk.org), which offers hundreds of forums and chatrooms for self-help support groups focused on a wide range of neurological disorders.
Started in 1993, Braintalk continues to explore new models of online communities and support. John will describe the growth and evolution of Braintalk as well as his work using the 3-d virtual world of Second Life ( www.secondlife.com) to create new online communities supporting people dealing with Asperger's Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, and Stroke Survivors. He will also summarize how different groups of patients and caregivers can use vastly different communication modalities to help them deal with unique conditions.

John Lester Bio:
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John Lester joined Linden Lab (the creators of Second Life) in 2005, bringing experience in online community development as well as a background in the fields of healthcare and education. Previously he was the Information Technology Director in the Neurology Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he pioneered the use of the web in 1993 to create online communities for supporting patients dealing with neurological disorders. He also held an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School , where he created online collaborative environments for professors and students to advance the case-based teaching method in medical education. John created and continues to manage BrainTalk Communities, a non-profit organization who's mission is to provide online environments for patient and caregiver self-help groups focused on neurological disorders.

HOW TO JOIN THE WEBCONFERENCE?
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Cut and paste the entire link below including the meeting_id in the address text box of your internet browser.

Session Link:

Via Smart Mobs

The Well's Inkwell Conference features a discussion with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware:

Computing devices shrink ever smaller and become invisible, while at the same time we interact with them and they communicate with one another. Rather than carrying phones and PDAs, our desks, rooms, and clothing, our food and our sex toys converge, interconnect, and interact. Their connectedness is hidden from us, we don't control the information they record, and there's no "Undo" key.

"Great, another loopy novelist in the Inkwell, extrapolating from a random headline in a trade journal," you say.

It's not loopy fiction, according to Adam Greenfield. Instead, it's the form computing will take in the next few years, and it behooves us to think it through in advance, in order both to understand it and humanize it. That's the subject of "Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing."

Join Adam Greenfield from the beginning of the conversation or catch up on the latest posts

The technique involves hooking people up to electrodes and getting them to try and control their brain waves. In people with autism, the "mu" wave is thought to be dysfunctional. Since this wave is associated with "mirror neurons" - the brain cells that underpin empathy and understanding of others - Jaime Pineda at the University of California, San Diego, wondered if controlling it through neurofeedback could exercise faulty mirror neurons and improve their function.

He attached sensors to the necks and heads of eight children with autism and had them watch a video game of a racing car going round a track. For all of the children, sitting still and concentrating kept the car travelling around the track, but five of them were also able to harness their mu waves and use them to adjust the car's speed.

After 30 sessions over 10 weeks, Pineda found that the five children's mu brainwaves had changed and they performed better on tasks involving imitation, typically difficult for people with autism.

An android for enhancing social skills and emotion recognition in people with autism.

IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2005 Dec;13(4):507-15

Authors: Pioggia G, Igliozzi R, Ferro M, Ahluwalia A, Muratori F, De Rossi D

It is well documented that the processing of social and emotional information is impaired in people with autism. Recent studies have shown that individuals, particularly those with high functioning autism, can learn to cope with common social situations if they are made to enact possible scenarios they may encounter in real life during therapy. The main aim of this work is to describe an interactive life-like facial display (FACE) and a supporting therapeutic protocol that will enable us to verify if the system can help children with autism to learn, identify, interpret, and use emotional information and extend these skills in a socially appropriate, flexible, and adaptive context. The therapeutic setup consists of a specially equipped room in which the subject, under the supervision of a therapist, can interact with FACE. The android display and associated control system has automatic facial tracking, expression recognition, and eye tracking. The treatment scheme is based on a series of therapist-guided sessions in which a patient communicates with FACE through an interactive console. Preliminary data regarding the exposure to FACE of two children are reported.

Via the IPRIZE website 

 

Eye tracking is a viable next-generation human computer interface. For individuals with significant motor disabilities, eye-tracking interfaces represent one of the few or only ways to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, current eye-tracking systems are expensive (over $10,000), invasive, inflexible, cumbersome and frustrating to use.

 

Moreover, improvements in eye tracking technology over the last 30 years have been purely incremental.

 

A revolution in eye tracking will be required in order to make eye tracking the next ubiquitous human computer interface. Simultaneous factors of 10 improvements are needed in the price, intrusiveness, robustness, speed, and accuracy of eye-tracking systems.

The IPRIZE is a $1,000,000 Grand Challenge designed to spark advances in eye-tracking technology through competition. Repeatedly throughout history, such Grand Challenges have lead to radical innovations that overcome significant technical and economic barriers. The IPRIZE competition will focus the efforts of scientific, engineering and entreprenuerial communities on this significant problem.

 

Learn more about eye-tracking technology and related applications (source: COGAIN project)

 

Portals and Links Collections

• EyeTracking.net, Internet resource dedicated to eye movement related research and applications (Systems, Labs & people, Apps & projects, Papers & courses, Events & jobs)
• Eyetracking Papers, John Dylan McCarthy's list of eyetracking research papers on web
• Gaze-Based HCI Bibliography, tutorial bibliography with links to on-line papers
• Eye Tracking Links by the Gaze-Based Interaction Group, University of Tampere

Eye Tracking Conferences and Meetings

• ECEM, European Conference on Eye Movements [ECEM13 2005] [ECEM12 2003] [ECEM11 2001] [ECEM10 1999]
• ETRA, Eye Tracking Research & Applications Symposium [ETRA 2006] [ETRA 2004] [ETRA 2002] [ETRA 2000]
• VIV, Vision in Vehicles [VIV11 2005] [VIV10 2003] [VIV9 2001]
• BIP 2005, International Workshop on Bioinspired Information Processing: Cognitive modeling and gaze-based communication
• The First Irish Workshop on Eye-Tracking
• Second Finnish Symposium for Eye-movement Research
• Eyes-Tea meetings