Positive Technology Journal

Nurs Adm Q. 2005 Oct-Dec;29(4):329-38.

Cheek P, Nikpour L, Nowlin HD

As baby-boomers age, the need for long-term nursing care services increases. In the future, there will simply not be enough long-term care facilities to accommodate all of these patients. In addition, many people prefer to grow old at home, a concept known as aging-in-place. Smart home technology facilities aging-in-place by assisting patients with emergency assistance, fall prevention/detection, reminder systems, medication administration and assistance for those with hearing, visual or cognitive impairments. Benefits include making aging-in-place a reality, continuous monitoring, and improved psychosocial effects. Concerns of this technology include cost, availability of technology, retrofitting complications, and potential inappropriate use of the technology. Overall, the concept of smart homes is gaining in popularity and will expand the role of the nurse in the future. It is important for all nurses to understand how their practices will be transformed as smart homes become a reality for the aging population.

Via Smart Mobs 

Workshop at CHI2006, Montreal, Canada, April 22-27, 2006

Deadline - 6 January 2006: Position paper to chi2006mososo@telin.nl

Social software has seen a tremendous jump in usage over the past few years and looks to take another significant leap forward as it becomes integrated into mobile devices we carry at all times. As designers of social software systems, we can now design for typical users who want to "do" social computing while they are in their social environments.

The goal for this workshop is to explore the research questions, coming directions, and relevant technologies surrounding expanded adoption of mobile social software. We plan to address issues in the following areas (see the workshop web page  for a full list of specific issues:

- How will mobile social software change existing social dynamics?
- How will location services and other new technologies change the game?
- What are the privacy risks and research challenges of these technologies?
- Next generation of mobile social software: What is it and when will we have it?
- How can we build a coordinated, cross-cultural research effort?

Via Action Potential

The December issue of Nature Neuroscience includes a special focus on computational and systems neuroscience highlighting research presented at the Cosyne meeting held this past March in Salt Lake City.

Here is the list of contributions included in the special focus:

A natural approach to studying vision pp1643 - 1646 Gidon Felsen & Yang Dan Published online: 23 November 2005 | doi:10.1038/nn1608 Abstract | Full text | PDF (108K)

In praise of artifice pp1647 - 1650 Nicole C Rust & J Anthony Movshon Published online: 23 November 2005 | doi:10.1038/nn1606 Abstract | Full text | PDF (159K)

Analyzing receptive fields, classification images and functional images: challenges with opportunities for synergy pp1651 - 1656 Jonathan D Victor Published online: 23 November 2005 | doi:10.1038/nn1607 Abstract | Full text | PDF (514K)

“Virtual Reality and Motor Disorders” Symposium
April 27th, 2006, Laval (France)
 
Laval Virtual is historically the biggest convention for Virtual Reality (VR) in Europe. With its industrial exhibition and its live demonstrations, it offers the possibility to discover and to test a wide range of interfaces and VR-based applications. Laval Virtual is also a scientific conference VRIC 2006 (Virtual Reality International Conference). On April 26-27-28th, 2006, it offers multiple opportunities of meetings, exchange of ideas, information as well as the possibility to attend the presentation of the most innovative applications of the field with lecturers from about 15 different countries and international papers published in the symposium Proceedings.
 
The “Virtual Reality and Motor Disorders” Symposium is a component of VRIC 2006. It will be held on April 27th, 2006. This full day symposium is dedicated to all issues regarding Motor Disorders with Virtual Reality. 
 
Areas covered include:

    - Motor disorders due to nervous system injuries;
    - Motor disorders due to orthopaedic injuries;
    - Balance and gait disorders;
    - Wheelchair mobility.

Interest is given to the consequences of VR use on functional activities of daily living.
 
The “Virtual Reality and Motor Disorders” Symposium will propose a wide range of works carried out to examine the different facets of the question; will allow meetings and exchanges between experts of these different fields; and will present VR-based systems designed for the affected people.
 
Our guest speaker is Tamar Weiss, Director of the Laboratory for Innovations in Rehabilitation Technology (LIRT) at the University of Haifa, Israel.
 
Call for Papers
 

        Submission of abstracts: January 27 th , 2006
        Notification of acceptation: February 10 th , 2006
        Submission of selected full papers: March 10 th , 2006
        Deadline for final revisions of full papers: March 24 th , 2006
 
If you need more information, please contact Evelyne Klinger (klinger@enst.fr), Scientific Chair of the symposium.

We are definitely looking forward to meet you personally at Laval Virtual 2006.
Evelyne Klinger, Simon Richir  & the Symposium’s Committee Program

Laval Virtual 8th International Conference on Virtual Reality

Mirella Dapretto, Mari S Davies, Jennifer H Pfeifer, Ashley A Scott, Marian Sigman, Susan Y Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni

To examine mirror neuron abnormalities in autism, high-functioning children with autism and matched controls underwent fMRI while imitating and observing emotional expressions. Although both groups performed the tasks equally well, children with autism showed no mirror neuron activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis). Notably, activity in this area was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain, suggesting that a dysfunctional 'mirror neuron system' may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.

via Science Daily

Robotic, simulated patients are allowing students in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine to practise clinical skills before they reach human patients. A simulator lab training centre set up by the anesthesia department allows students to experience the challenges of working in a hospital operating room in a setting that looks and functions as close as possible to the real thing...

Read full article

Biol Psychiatry. 2005 Nov 30;

Authors: Cornwell BR, Johnson L, Berardi L, Grillon C

Startle reflex modification has become valuable to the study of fear and anxiety, but few studies have explored startle reactivity in socially threatening situations. METHODS: Healthy participants ranging in trait social anxiety entered virtual reality (VR) that simulates standing center-stage in front of an audience to anticipate giving a speech and count backward. We measured startle and autonomic reactivity during anticipation of both tasks inside VR after a single baseline recording outside VR. RESULTS: Trait social anxiety, but not general trait anxiety, was positively correlated with startle before entering VR and most clearly during speech anticipation inside VR. Speech anticipation inside VR also elicited stronger physiologic responses relative to anticipation of counting. CONCLUSIONS: Under social-evaluative threat, startle reactivity showed robust relationships with fear of negative evaluation, a central aspect of social anxiety and clinical social phobia. Context-specific startle modification may be an endophenotype for subtypes of pathological anxiety.

Via Neurodudes

From Eugene Izhikevich’s website

On October 27, 2005 I finished simulation of a model that has the size of the human brain. The model has 100,000,000,000 neurons (hundred billion or 10^11) and almost 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion or 10^15) synapses. It represents 300×300 mm^2 of mammalian thalamo-cortical surface, specific, non-specific, and reticular thalamic nuclei, and spiking neurons with firing properties corresponding to those recorded in the mammalian brain. The model exhibited alpha and gamma rhythms, moving clusters of neurons in up- and down-states, and other interesting phenomena (watch a 25M .avi or .mov movie). One second of simulation took 50 days on a beowulf cluster of 27 processors (3GHz each). Why did I do that?...

Via Networked performance

Ana Paiva, Rui Prada, Ricardo Chaves, Marco Vala, Adrian Bullock, Gerd Andersson, and Kristina Hook, ICMI’03, November 5–7, 2003, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

In this paper, we describe a way of controlling the emotional states of a synthetic character in a game (FantasyA) through a tangible interface named SenToy. SenToy is a doll with sensors in the arms, legs and body, allowing the user to influence the emotions of her character in the game. The user performs gestures and movements with SenToy, which are picked up by the sensors and interpreted according to a scheme found through an intial Wizard of Oz study. Different gestures are used to express each of the following emotions: anger, fear, happiness, surprise, sadness and gloating. Depending on the expressed emotion, the synthetic character in FantasyA will, in turn, perform different actions. The evaluation of SenToy acting as the interface to the computer game FantasyA has shown that users were able to express most of the desired emotions to influence the synthetic characters, and that overall, players, especially children, really liked the doll as an interface."

Read full paper:

Towards Tangibility in Gameplay: Building a Tangible Affective Interface for a Computer Game [pdf]

From Wikipedia

The Uncanny Valley is a principle of robotics concerning the emotional response of humans to robots and other non-human entities. It was theorized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. The principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive; as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.

Emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following Mori's results. The Uncanny Valley is the region of negative emotional response for robots that seem "almost human".

This gap of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name harkens to the notion that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the requisite empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Another possibility is that infected individuals and corpses exhibit many visual anomalies similar to the ones we see with humanoid robots and so we react with the same alarm and revulsion. The reaction may in fact become worse with robots since there is no overt reason for it to occur; when we see a corpse we understand where our feelings come from. Behavioural anomalies too are indicative of illness, neurological conditions or mental dysfunction, and again evoke acutely negative emotions.

Some roboticists have heavily criticized the theory, arguing that Mori had no basis for the right part of his chart, as human-like robots are only now technically possible (and still only partially). David Hanson, a roboticist who developed a realistic robotic copy of his girlfriend's head, said the idea of the Uncanny Valley was "really pseudoscientific, but people treat it like it is science." Sara Kiesler, a human-robot interaction researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, questioned Uncanny Valley's scientific status, noting that "we have evidence that it’s true, and evidence that it’s not."

Via Usability news

11-15 September 2006
Queen Mary, University of London
The 20th British HCI Group conference in co-operation with ACM.

"Misuse and Abuse of Interactive Technologies" CHI 2006 Workshop Date: Saturday, April 22 (Full day) Venue: Montreal, Canada, http://www.chi2006.org/

Submission Deadline: January 10

From the event's web site: 

Via Brain Blog

Thomas P, Lalloue F, Preux PM, Hazif-Thomas C, Pariel S, Inscale R, Belmin J, & Clement JP. Dementia patients caregivers quality of life: The PIXEL study. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry. 2005 Dec 2; [Epub ahead of print]

University Department of Psychogeriatrics & Memory Clinic CH Limoges, France.

Via VRPSYCH mailing list 

A one year post-doc position is available at INRIA in Grenoble on VR and 3D interaction.
The candidate should have defended his PhD less than 1 year ago and should have an excellent CV.
The post-doc is available "immediately".

For more information, contact as soon as possible:
Sabine Coquillart
Sabine.Coquillart@inria.fr
Tel: +33 (0)4 76 61 52 65

J Neural Eng. 2005 Dec;2(4):L14-22

Authors: Schlögl A, Lee F, Bischof H, Pfurtscheller G

To determine and compare the performance of different classifiers applied to four-class EEG data is the goal of this communication. The EEG data were recorded with 60 electrodes from five subjects performing four different motor-imagery tasks. The EEG signal was modeled by an adaptive autoregressive (AAR) process whose parameters were extracted by Kalman filtering. By these AAR parameters four classifiers were obtained, namely minimum distance analysis (MDA)-for single-channel analysis, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA), k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) classifiers as well as support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for multi-channel analysis. The performance of all four classifiers was quantified and evaluated by Cohen's kappa coefficient, an advantageous measure we introduced here to BCI research for the first time. The single-channel results gave rise to topographic maps that revealed the channels with the highest level of separability between classes for each subject. Our results of the multi-channel analysis indicate SVM as the most successful classifier, whereas kNN performed worst.

J Neural Eng. 2005 Dec;2(4):65-72

Authors: Qin L, He B

Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings during motor imagery tasks are often used as input signals for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). The translation of these EEG signals to control signals of a device is based on a good classification of various kinds of imagination. We have developed a wavelet-based time-frequency analysis approach for classifying motor imagery tasks. Time-frequency distributions (TFDs) were constructed based on wavelet decomposition and event-related (de)synchronization patterns were extracted from symmetric electrode pairs. The weighted energy difference of the electrode pairs was then compared to classify the imaginary movement. The present method has been tested in nine human subjects and reached an averaged classification rate of 78%. The simplicity of the present technique suggests that it may provide an alternative method for EEG-based BCI applications.

From The Birmingham News

When pilots learn to fly and surgeons to cut, virtual reality comes in handy where blunders can be fatal.

Learning to cross the street is no different, so David Schwebel, associate professor of psychology at UAB, is developing a virtual reality game to teach school children how to cross safely. Of 4,641 pedestrians who died nationwide last year, 363 were 14 and younger, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration...
read the full article here