Positive Technology Journal

An exploratory mixed methods study of the acceptability and effectiveness of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for patients with active depression and anxiety in primary care.

BMC Psychiatry. 2006 Apr 7;6(1):14

Authors: Finucaine A, Mercer SW

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is an 8-week course developed for patients with relapsing depression that integrates mindfulness meditation practices and cognitive theory. Previous studies have demonstrated that non-depressed participants with a history of relapsing depression are protected from relapse by participating in the course. This exploratory study examined the acceptability and effectiveness of MBCT for patients in primary care with active symptoms of depression and anxiety METHODS: 13 patients with recurrent depression or recurrent depression and anxiety were recruited to take part in the study. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted three months after completing the MBCT programme. A framework approach was used to analyse the data. Beck depression inventories (BDI-II) and Beck anxiety inventories (BAI) provided quantitative data and were administered before and three months after the intervention. RESULTS: The qualitative data indicated that mindfulness training was both acceptable and beneficial to the majority of patients. For many of the participants, being in a group was an important normalising and validating experience. However most of the group believed the course was too short and thought that some form of follow up was essential. More than half the patients continued to apply mindfulness techniques three months after the course had ended. A minority of patients continued to experience significant levels of psychological distress, particularly anxiety. Statistically significant reductions in mean depression and anxiety scores were observed; the mean pre-course depression score was 35.7 and post-course score was 17.8 (p=0.001). A similar reduction was noted for anxiety with a mean pre-course anxiety score of 32.0 and mean post course score of 20.5 (p=0.039). Overall 8/11 (72%) patients showed improvements in BDI and 7/11 (63%) patients showed improvements in BAI. In general the results of the qualitative analysis agreed well with the quantitative changes in depression and anxiety reported. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this exploratory mixed methods study suggest that mindfulness based cognitive therapy may have a role to play in treating active depression and anxiety in primary care.

A comparison of common spatial patterns with complex band power features in a four-class BCI experiment.

IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2006 Apr;53(4):642-51

Authors: Townsend G, Graimann B, Pfurtscheller G

We report on the offline analysis of four-class brain-computer interface (BCI) data recordings. Although the analysis is done within defined time windows (cue-based BCI), our goal is to work toward an approach which classifies on-going electroencephalogram (EEG) signals without the use of such windows (un-cued BCI). To that end, we provide some elements of that analysis related to timing issues that will become important as we pursue this goal in the future. A new set of features called complex band power (CBP) features which make explicit use of phase are introduced and are shown to produce good results. As reference methods we used traditional band power features and the method of common spatial patterns. We consider also for the first time in the context of a four-class problem the issue of variability of the features over time and how much data is required to give good classification results. We do this in a practical way where training data precedes testing data in time.

Via Linux devices

The "emotional lamp," is a WiFi-connected device that can be programmed to respond to real-world events by emanating sequences of gentle color.

Unlike a telephone or television, the lamp presents information without making intrusive or extensive time demands. Messages and information are diffused subtly into the general ambient, communicated through "color changes and their rate/rhythm of posting."

Customizable, built-in functions include multi-day weather forecasts, stock market monitoring, traffic conditions on a daily commute route, receipt of a large number of emails or email from an important person, or Web site updates containing specified key words. Additional built-in functions are planned.

Personalization features enable the creation of "bouquets" of friends authorized to interact with the Dal lamp through email, SMS, a Dal lamp of their own, or a telephone gateway service maintained by Violet. From the Violet Website: "The messages are colored animations that can be created for each type of emotion you want to show. A personal language and grammar can be created between two persons: only they know what the lamp is expressing."

The Dal lamp has been exhibited at some of the world's most prestigious museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and The City of Science and Industry in Seoul, Korea. It received the "Star of the Observeur de design, 2004," a design award from the French Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creations.

Via VRoot 

openEyes is an open-source open-hardware toolkit for low-cost real-time eye tracking.

From VRTech press release:

Given the increasing demands for more intuitive computer interfaces, tracking the eye movements of users, which precisely indicates users’ attention states, provides researchers and usability experts with invaluable data. However, the high cost of eye-tracking hardware and the lack of available software that implements long-established eye-tracking methods prohibit many interface developers and researchers from accessing or utilizing critical eye-movement data. In response to the need for more widely accessible eye-tracking hardware and software, Derrick Parkhurst, assistant professor of psychology and associate director of VRAC, created the first open source toolkit for low-cost eye tracking, known as openEyes.

26 June 2006 to 28 June 2006
International IEEE Workshop on Tangible Interaction in Collaborative Environments (TICE) at WETICE-2006

June 26 - June 28, 2006
The University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K.
Web site: http://wetice.co.umist.ac.uk/

OVERVIEW
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Road-crossing safety in virtual reality: a comparison of adolescents with and without ADHD.

J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol. 2006 Jun;35(2):203-15

Authors: Clancy TA, Rucklidge JJ, Owen D

From Cognews

How does the ant, without maps and satellite naviation, make regular trips home without getting lost? Dr Markus Knaden, from the University of Zurich, reports that a visit back to the nest is essential for ants to reset their navigation equipment and avoid getting lost on foraging trips. "Knowledge about path integration and landmark learning gained from our experiments with ants has already been incorporated in autonomous robots. Including a 'reset' of the path integrator at a significant position could make the orientation of the robot even more reliable", says Dr Knaden who spoke on Tuesday 4th April at the Society for Experimental Biology's Main Annual Meeting in Canterbury, Kent. ...

Wearable vibrotactile systems for virtual contact and information display

R.W. Lindeman, Y. Yanagida, H. Noma and K. Hosaka

Virtual Reality Volume 9, Numbers 2-3; Date: March 2006; Pages: 203 - 213

This paper presents a development history of a wearable, scalable vibrotactile stimulus delivery system. This history has followed a path from desktop-based, fully wired systems, through hybrid approaches consisting of a wireless connection from the host computer to a body-worn control box and wires to each tactor, to a completely wireless system employing Bluetooth technology to connect directly from the host to each individual tactor unit.

Subjective performance

K. Bormann

Virtual Reality Volume 9, Number 4; Date: April 2006; Pages: 226 - 233

Much effort has gone into exploring the concept of presence in virtual environments. One of the reasons for this is the possible link between presence and performance, which has also received a fair amount of attention. However, the performance side of this equation has been largely ignored.

Supporting visually impaired children with software agents in a multimodal learning environment

R. Saarinen, J. Järvi, R. Raisamo, E. Tuominen, M. Kangassalo, K. Peltola and J. Salo

Virtual Reality; Volume 9, Numbers 2-3; Date: March 2006; Pages: 108 - 117

From the CAVE Writing website

The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word.

Powered by a high-performance parallel computer, the Cave is an eight-foot cube, wherein the floor and three walls are projected with high-resolution stereo graphics to create a virtual environment, viewed through special “shutter-lens” glasses. The Cave Writing Workshop has introduced a Macintosh sound server to provide positional sound and augment the Cave’s performance potential, surrounding the “reader” with dynamic three-dimensional sound as well as visuals. It has brought text into this highly visual environment in the composing of narrative and poetic works of art, and has experimented with navigational structures more akin to narrative, and in particular hypertext narrative, than to the predominant forms of spatial exploration.

Mediated social touch: a review of current research and future directions

Antal Haans and Wijnand IJsselsteijn

Virtual Reality. Issue: Volume 9, Numbers 2-3; Date: March 2006; Pages: 149 - 159

Abstract

From rdu.news14.com

More than a million people in the United States are legally blind. Many of them once had vision but tragically lost it. Now a breakthrough device could give them back some of their sight.

read full article 

From Textually 

Australians are increasingly becoming so addicted to mobile phones they are suffering anxiety and self-esteem problems akin to substance abuse, writes The Sydney Morning Herald. Excessive mobile users experience personal problems ranging from agitation if forced to turn them off...

read full post

Video-capture virtual reality system for patients with paraplegic spinal cord injury.

J Rehabil Res Dev. 2005 Sep-Oct;42(5):595-608

Authors: Kizony R, Raz L, Katz N, Weingarden H, Weiss PL

This article presents results from a feasibility study of a video-capture virtual reality (VR) system used with patients who have paraplegic spinal cord injury (SCI) and who need balance training. The advantages of the VR system include providing the user with natural control of movements, the ability to use as many parts of the body as are deemed suitable within the context of therapeutic goals, and flexibility in the way the system can be adapted to suit specific therapeutic objectives. Thirteen participants with SCI experienced three virtual environments (VEs). Their responses to a Short Feedback Questionnaire showed high levels of presence. We compared performance in the environments with a group of 12 nondisabled participants. Response times for the patient group were significantly higher and percentage of success was significantly lower than that for the nondisabled group. In addition, significant moderate correlations were found between performance within a VE and static balance ability as measured by the Functional Reach Test. This study is a first step toward future studies aimed at determining the potential of using this VR system during the rehabilitation of patients with SCI.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of the Effects of Neurofeedback Training on the Neural Bases of Selective Attention and Response Inhibition in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback. 2006 Mar 22;

Authors: Beauregard M, Lévesque J

Two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments were undertaken to measure the effect of neurofeedback training (NFT), in AD/HD children, on the neural substrates of selective attention and response inhibition. Twenty unmedicated AD/HD children participated to these experiments. Fifteen children were randomly assigned to the Experimental (EXP) group whereas the other five children were randomly assigned to the Control (CON) group. Only subjects in the EXP group underwent NFT. EXP subjects were trained to enhance the amplitude of the SMR (12-15 Hz) and beta 1 activity (15-18 Hz), and decrease the amplitude of theta activity (4-7 Hz). Subjects from both groups were scanned one week before the beginning of NFT (Time 1) and 1 week after the end of NFT (Time 2), while they performed a "Counting Stroop" task (Experiment 1) and a Go/No-Go task (Experiment 2). At Time 1, in both groups, the Counting Stroop task was associated with significant activation in the left superior parietal lobule. For the Go/No-Go task, no significant activity was detected in the EXP and CON groups. At Time 2, in both groups, the Counting Stroop task was associated with significant activation of the left superior parietal lobule. This time, however, there were significant loci of activation, in the EXP group, in the right ACC, left caudate nucleus, and left substantia nigra. No such activation loci were seen in CON subjects. For the Go/No-Go task, significant loci of activation were noted, in the EXP group, in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, right ACcd, left thalamus, left caudate nucleus, and left substantia nigra. No significant activation of these brain regions was measured in CON subjects. These results suggest that NFT has the capacity to functionally normalize the brain systems mediating selective attention and response inhibition in AD/HD children.

The meeting of meditative disciplines and Western psychology: a mutually enriching dialogue.

Am Psychol. 2006 Apr;61(3):227-39

Authors: Walsh R, Shapiro SL

Classification of movement intention by spatially filtered electromagnetic inverse solutions.

Phys Med Biol. 2006 Apr 21;51(8):1971-89

Authors: Congedo M, Lotte F, Lécuyer A

We couple standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography, an inverse solution for electroencephalography (EEG) and the common spatial pattern, which is here conceived as a data-driven beamformer, to classify the benchmark BCI (brain-computer interface) competition 2003, data set IV. The data set is from an experiment where a subject performed a self-paced left and right finger tapping task. Available for analysis are 314 training trials whereas 100 unlabelled test trials have to be classified. The EEG data from 28 electrodes comprise the recording of the 500 ms before the actual finger movements, hence represent uniquely the left and right finger movement intention. Despite our use of an untrained classifier, and our extraction of only one attribute per class, our method yields accuracy similar to the winners of the competition for this data set. The distinct advantages of the approach presented here are the use of an untrained classifier and the processing speed, which make the method suitable for actual BCI applications. The proposed method is favourable over existing classification methods based on an EEG inverse solution, which rely either on iterative algorithms for single-trial independent component analysis or on trained classifiers.