Positive Technology Journal

From Monday July 3rd to Thursday July 6th, 2006, University of Minho (Portugal) will host the 3rd European Conference on Positive Psychology. In this new century, Positive Psychology has become one of the major approaches to the study of individual behaviour and social processes. In this innovative and promising scientific field, a growing number of theoretical, empirical and applied projects are investigating positive psychological issues such as the subjective well-being, creativity, leisure, personal strengths and resources, and their implications on individual, social and community development. This Third European Conference on Positive Psychology provides an opportunity to discuss and develop new theoretical and empirical perspectives, to foster networking among scholars, and to explore new applications of Positive Psychology.

For more information visit the conference's web site

This free-downloadable report by Huiyu Zhou and Huosheng Hu from Essex University (UK) reviews recent progress in human movement tracking systems in general, and stroke rehabilitation in particular.

It is a wonderful resource for all researchers interested in technology-enhanced rehabilitation after stroke

Pervasive Healthcare Conference 2006 will be held in Innsbruck, Austria (dates to be defined). Pervasive Healthcare is emerging both as a solution to many existing healthcare problems such as significant number of medical errors, considerable stress on healthcare providers, and partial coverage of healthcare services in rural and underserved areas worldwide, and as an opportunity to provide better healthcare services to an increasing number of people using limited financial and human resources. Pervasive healthcare can be defined as healthcare to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare.

Conference topics include, but are not limited to: technologies situated "on the patient", technologies situated "in the environment", medical aspects of pervasive healthcare, and management of pervasive healthcare.

For more information visit the conference website

Tags: pervasive healthcare

Via Networked Performance

Sensory Threads aims to stimulate and inform a public debate on how personal biosensor data is collected and used in biomedical science. It will combine an artistic with an evidence-based approach, building and testing a prototype body biosensor network that uploads data to Urban Tapestries.

This will allow participants to map experiential and emotional annotations to their readings – adding a whole new layer of sentient knowledge to machine data. It is intended to demystify how data is collected, what it produces and how we can correlate it to other factors affecting health such as environmental pollution.

Principal Investigators: Giles Lane (Proboscis) & George Roussos (Birkbeck)
Team: Alice Angus, Orlagh Woods, Sarah Thelwall, George Papamarkos, Dikaios Papadogkonas
Partners: Proboscis, Birkbeck College Computer Science Dept.

Via Torontoartsonline

Dimensionality takes assumptions of perspective is coming to an end, or mutating under new environmental pressures—video games, computer animation, 3-D computer models as its generative trope. Curator, Andy Patton has assembled a group of artists whose specific practices address the new spaces of digital realities. The works in the exhibition are often diagrammatic and stripped of worldly detail. They declare an involvement with information instead of sensuous phenomena. The participating artists don’t produce the sort of naturalist space we've seen for the last few centuries, rather, their space is structured like that of video games—a space that’s only convincing if it streams rapidly by, before its too-generalized surfaces can be inspected. deep and convincing, as though you could walk into it. As Patton states, "Star Trek was wrong: space is the initial frontier"

Featuring: Sheila Ayearst, Robert Fones, Morna Gamblin, Nestor Kruger, Angela Leach, Kristen Peterson, David Reed

Starts: Sep 10, 2005 Ends: Oct 22, 2005
At: YYZ Artists' Outlet, 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 140, Toronto
Times: 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Cost: Free

An interesting review article* on the neural basis of moral cognition has been published on October 2005 issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience by Jorge Moll, Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Frank Krueger and Jordan Grafman.

The Whole Brain Atlas has been awarded the Scientific American Science and Technology Web Awards 2005

The site is an information resource for central nervous system imaging which integrates clinical information with magnetic resonance (MR), x-ray computed tomography (CT), and nuclear medicine images. The site presents high-resolution images of various types of strokes, tumors, degenerative disorders and infectious diseases as they affect the brain over time.

Another award has gone to Mind Hacks, a blog that reports on the latest developments in neuroscience, taking a fun approach to dissemination.

The Washington Post reports about the second annual Games for Health Conference, at University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore:

But some physicians, psychiatrists and public health experts see a more positive side: They're betting electronic games can be adapted as tools to ease medical treatments, improve patient outcomes and boost fitness and knowledge for users young and old. Government agencies including the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Office of Naval Research and other branches of the Department of Defense are placing bets of their own, funding the development of health-related video games. Some of those projects and others were on display recently at the second annual Games for Health conference at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Between lectures, participants crowded into two windowless rooms for a first-hand look. In one, they could test themselves on the Kilowatt, an isometric exercise device in which players use body strength to interact with scenes on a video screen - for instance, muscling a car around a race track. In another room, attendees donned a virtual-reality helmet for a simulated plunge into FreeDive, a fantasy underwater world meant to distract pediatric patients from pain or anxiety.

More to explore

The Serious Games Initiative

A team of four University of Ulster researchers have won Innovations in Stroke Care Award for using virtual reality in helping people with strokes regain use of their limbs. The four who received the Innovations in Stroke Care award are: Jacqueline Crosbie, Professor Suzanne McDonough and Dr Sheila Lennon from the Health and Rehabilitation Sciences Research Institute at Jordanstown along with Dr Michael McNeill from the School of Computing and Information Engineering, at Coleraine.

Congratulations from Positive Technology!

Tags: virtual reality

More to explore

TUESDAY, 4th October 2005 Interface [s] Montréal 5:30pm

From aerospace to surgery, and in all things game related, the simulators and immersion environments developed to serve humankind are indispensable tools that significantly improve human knowledge and enhance our reality experience.

Speakers: Yves Gonthier - Canadian Space Agency; Jean-Claude Artonne - Immervision; Jocelyn Faubert - Université de Montréal, École d'optométrie; Carl-Éric Aubin - École Polytechnique de Montréal, Dép. génie mécanique & CHU Sainte-Justine; Luc Courchesne - Université de Montréal et Ideaction.

[Yves Gonthier]: A Real-Time Simulator for 3D Mental Image Reconstruction On-Board the International Space Station

[Jocelyn Faubert] : Understanding human behavior with immersive virtual environments

[Carl-Éric Aubin] Surgical Simulator for the Virtual Prototyping of the Surgical Instrumentation of the Scoliotic Spine

[Luc Courchesne] Panoscope 360°

Tags: virtual reality

Sept. 27 issue of Neurology reports results of a study, which has investigated the effect of simulator-based training on driving after stroke. The research has involved 83 subacute stroke patients randomly assigned to either simulator-based training or control group. Then, all patients were evaluated in off-road and on-road performance tests to assess their driving ability after training. Results showed that virtual reality training improved driving ability, especially for well educated and less disabled stroke patients. However, authors warn that findings of the study may have been modified as a result of the large number of dropouts and the possibility of some neurologic recovery unrelated to training.

More to explore

A. E. Akinwuntan, W. De Weerdt, H. Feys, J. Pauwels, G. Baten, P. Arno, and C. Kiekens Effect of simulator training on driving after stroke: A randomized controlled trial, Neurology 2005 65: 843-850

Sveistrup, H. Motor rehabilitation using virtual reality, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2004, 1:10 (download full text)

Here is a quote from a New Scientist article that sums up Kurzweil's projections:

"Ultimately, we will merge with our technology. This will begin with nanobots in our bodies and brains. The nanobots will keep us healthy, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, provide direct brain-to-brain communication over the internet and greatly expand human intelligence. But keep in mind that non-biological intelligence is doubling in capability each year, whereas our biological intelligence is essentially fixed. As we get to the 2030s, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will predominate. By the mid 2040s, the non-biological portion of our intelligence will be billions of times more capable than the biological portion. Non-biological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle."

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems can be viewed as environments in which people will increasingly live their lives. Ubiquitous AmI technologies and systems like personal digital assistants, wearable sensors, mobile phones challenge traditional usability evaluation methods, because use context can be difficult to recreate in a laboratory setting. This view suggests that the evaluation of user’s experience with AmI systems should take place in realistic contexts, such the workplace, the home, etc. Another issue has to do with the content of the evaluation. Performance-based approaches are not suitable for AmI systems, because it is difficult to specify tasks that capture the complexity of real world activities. Moreover, experience is idiosyncratic, in that it is related to the specific bio-cultural configuration of each individual, and it can undergo changes throughout individual life and daily situations.

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) offers a new perspective in the analysis of these issues. ESM is based on the online repeated assessment of individual behavior and experience in the daily context. Participants describe themselves and their environment while interacting with it. They carry with them for one week an electronic beeper and a booklet of self-report forms. Whenever they receive an acoustic signal, they are expected to fill out a form. The form contains open-ended questions about situational variables such as place, activities carried out, social context, and subjective variables such as the content of thought, perceived goals, and physical conditions. The form also contains 0-12 Likert-type scales investigating the quality of experience in its various components: affect, motivation, activation, and cognitive efficiency.

Intille and colleagues at MIT have recently developed a Personal Digital Assistant-based version of the ESM which can be used for user-interface development and assessment of ubiquitous computing applications. This approach, called Context-Aware Experience Sampling, includes the possibility to assess user’s experience not only through the standard time-based protocol, but also according to the participant’s location, by means of information provided by a GPS plug-in. Thus, researchers can design experiments collecting self-reports only when the participant is near a location of interest. Moreover, users can answers via audio recording or by taking a picture with a camera.

More to explore

S. S. Intille, J. Rondoni, C. Kukla, I. Ancona, L. Bao, A context-aware experience sampling tool, CHI Extended Abstracts 2003, 972-973.

Gaggioli, A., Optimal Experience in Ambient Intelligence (2005), in Ambient Intelligence, Riva, G., Vatalaro, F., Davide, F., Alcañiz, M. (Eds.), Amsterdam: IOS Press. PDF

The new edition of Scientific American Mind

Smarter on Drugs
By Michael S. Gazzaniga

We recoil at the idea of people taking drugs to enhance their intelligence. But why?

The Movie in Your Head
By Christof Koch

Is consciousness a seamless experience or a string of fleeting images, like frames of a movie? The emerging answer will determine whether the "real world" is merely an illusion

Big Answers from Little People
By David Dobbs

In infants, Elizabeth Spelke finds fundamental insights into how men and women think

Custody Disputed
By Robert E. Emery, Randy K. Otto and William O'Donohue

The guidelines judges and psychologists use to decide child custody cases have little basis in science. The system must be rebuilt on better data

Judging Amy and Andy
By Katja Gaschler

Contrary to warnings, we can size up people pretty well based on first impressions

Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes
By Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard

People with synesthesia--whose senses blend together--are providing valuable clues to understanding the organization and functions of the human brain

The Psychology of Tyranny
By S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely--or does it?

Mending the Spinal Cord
By Ulrich Kraft

Researchers are finding ways to help nerves regenerate, and hope for therapies is growin

Just a Bit Different
By Ingelore Moeller

With special training early in life, children born with Down syndrome have a higher chance of becoming independent

Interactive Cinema - Media Fabrics is a research initiative at MIT that focuses on a new paradigm: the "media fabric" - a semi-intelligent organism where lines of communication, threads of meaning, chains of causality, and streams of consciousness converge and intertwine to form a rich tapestry of creative story potentials, meaningful real-time dialogues, social interactions, and personal or communal art- and story-making.

More to explore

The Media Fabrics website

Via Engadget

VirtuSphere is a 360-degree VR environment that allows for moving in any direction. The device consists of a large hollow sphere, placed on a special platform that allows the sphere to rotate in any direction as the user moves within it. Sensors under the sphere provide subject speed and direction to the computer running the simulation and users can interact with virtual objects using a special manipulator.

According to Virtusphere staff, the device has several potential applications in the field of training/simulations, health/rehabilitation, gaming and more. The device cost should range between $50K and $100K.

More to explore

VirtuSphere

Holo-Dek: A Unique Real-World Virtual Venue

CirculaFloor - Smart Tile Holodeck?

Neuroprotection in Neurological Diseases - A Promising Therapeutic Strategy or Chimera?

24-26 November 2005
Giardini Naxos (Taormina), Sicily

Achieving proven Neuroprotection remains an unattained goal; however strategies exist which may delay disease progression in chronic conditions and which show promise of damage limitation in the acute setting. The conference will discuss best treatment practice, present new research and debate issues surrounding Neuronal Plasticity and Neuroprotection.

The draft programme is available at www.sinspn.org

Via dataisnature

BrainMirror is an interactive experience where the image of the visitors brain appears mixed with his/her mirror image, using natural head movement as an interface to explore volumetric visuals of the human brain. How it works? a motion tracker computer watches the audience through four fire-wire cameras equipped with infra-red filters. The helmets are mounted with super-bright infra-red LED's, each modulating it's brightness with it's own unique finger-print id-code.

Download video (32Mb Quicktime)

via Pasta & Vinegar

The International Journal of Design Computing has a special Issue on the Space Between the Physical and the Virtual: