Positive Technology Journal

Via Pasta and Vinegar 

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design: 

The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design is a new initiative happening in Denmark. The two key promoters of this initiative are Heather Martin and Simona Maschi.

The aim is to create a high profile design institute, which is small but dynamic and which interfaces with academia and industry. The institute will become an international setting for new thinking in design and technology in Copenhagen. The institute will encourage multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary learning, teaching and consulting in Interaction Design. We imagine that people both from the academic and the industrial world will come to Copenhagen to work with us on innovative products, services and technology for the future. The institute aims to become an international centre of excellence in interaction design and innovation by 201

From Networked Performance

Within the field of interactive dance technology, a number of projects have experimented with dancers producing music in real time from their body movements, as opposed to following the music. In MusicViaMotion (2000) for example, dance movements are captured with a video camera and mapped to sound synthesis in real time. In MIT Medialab's Expressive Footwear project (1998) and Katherine Moriwaki's Music Shoes (2000), the dancers wear sport shoes respectively chinese slippers, equipped with a range of sensors. In Alfred Desio's Zapped Taps, sensors are also used, this time on tap shoes. In all these projects, the sensed movements actuate and modulate artificial sounds.

From KurzweilAI.net

Parsons School of Design teacher Manuel Lima has constructed striking images that represent complexity.

Re-blogged from World of Psychology (original post by Sandra Kiume) 

The Design for Our Future Selves awards 2006 from the Royal College of Art offered seven awards for ‘An architecture, design or communication project which addresses a social issue or engages with a particular social group in order to improve independence, mobility, health or working life.’

Christopher Peacock won the Snowdon Award for Disability Projects and the Help the Aged Award for Independent Living with his invention handSteady. It’s an innovative device enabling people experiencing tremor (involuntary shaking caused by Parkinson’s disease, side effects from some medications and other conditions) to stabilize objects as they hold them.

Sohui Won, a finalist in Interaction Design, created psychological tools for treatment of loneliness in a project titled Weird Objects - Objects for autophobics and for all of us who experience loneliness and autophobia (fear of being alone).

Among the creations:

BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technology Lab (Stanford University) is sponsoring Mobile Persuasion 06, a one-day conference on how mobile technology can change people's beliefs and behaviors.

From the conference website:

Mobile Persuasion is for innovators, researchers, and companies creating mobile technologies that change people’s beliefs and behaviors. Applications include health, commerce, activism, social networking, addiction, advertising, gaming, and environmental conservation. This full-day event will feature expert presentations and panels on how mobile technology can change attitudes and behaviors.  

 

The event will take place November 10th at Stanford University. Free registration is available for a limited time.

Via Mind Hacks 

PBS has a fun flash game where you can recreate Wilder Penfield's brain stimulation experiments from the safety of your own desktop on a virtual human. 

Link to brain probe game.

Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka University in Japan, has created a robot clone of himself. The robot, dubbed “Geminoid HI-1”, looks and moves exactly like him, and sometimes takes his place in meetings and classes.

Link to Wired article on Ishiguro's android double.

See also the Geminoid videos 

Via Medical Connectivity Consulting 

FitSense Technology's ActiHealth Intelligent Network provides an end to end system that collects, transports and presents physiological data automatically. Data that can be viewed instantly by the user as they go through their day. In the ActiHealth network, the body sensors monitor several health indexes, including physical activity, calorie burn, weight, body fat, blood pressure, blood glucose, heart rate. 

According to the company,  the system can be used in  a range of health care applications, such as  programs for weight management, health & wellness, and disease management.

Via Medgadget 

My Beating Heart is an haptic relaxation pillow that gently beats out a slow, steady heart-like rhythm. The $120 heart-shaped pillow uses a rumble pack-style haptic system so that you can feel the heart beat as you hold it.

From the product's website:

My Beating Heart is a soft huggable heart with a soothing heartbeat you can really feel. When hugging the heart, the tactile heartbeat reminds you of holding a pet or a loved-one. Hold the heart a moment and you'll begin to sense your own heartbeat slowly syncing with My Beating Heart's carefully designed rhythm. My Beating Heart is designed to help you relax, daydream, meditate, and nap.

Via Information Aesthetics

A new method for querying relational databases & live data streams through the manipulation of physical objects. Parameterized query fragments are embodied as physical tokens ("parameter wheels"). These tokens are manipulated, interpreted, & graphically augmented on a series of sliding racks, to which data visualizations adapt in real time.

see also bumptop desktop metaphor.

Nature 442, 164-171(13 July 2006)

Leigh R. Hochberg, Mijail D. Serruya, Gerhard M. Friehs, Jon A. Mukand, Maryam Saleh, Abraham H. Caplan, Almut Branner, David Chen, Richard D. Penn and John P. Donoghue

Neuromotor prostheses (NMPs) aim to replace or restore lost motor functions in paralysed humans by routeing movement-related signals from the brain, around damaged parts of the nervous system, to external effectors. To translate preclinical results from intact animals to a clinically useful NMP, movement signals must persist in cortex after spinal cord injury and be engaged by movement intent when sensory inputs and limb movement are long absent. Furthermore, NMPs would require that intention-driven neuronal activity be converted into a control signal that enables useful tasks. Here we show initial results for a tetraplegic human (MN) using a pilot NMP. Neuronal ensemble activity recorded through a 96-microelectrode array implanted in primary motor cortex demonstrated that intended hand motion modulates cortical spiking patterns three years after spinal cord injury. Decoders were created, providing a 'neural cursor' with which MN opened simulated e-mail and operated devices such as a television, even while conversing. Furthermore, MN used neural control to open and close a prosthetic hand, and perform rudimentary actions with a multi-jointed robotic arm. These early results suggest that NMPs based upon intracortical neuronal ensemble spiking activity could provide a valuable new neurotechnology to restore independence for humans with paralysis.

From the project's website 

CatchBob is an experimental platform to elicit collaborative behavior of people working together on a mobile activity. Running on a mobile device (iPAQ, TabletPc), it's a collaborative hunt in which groups of three persons have to find and circle a virtual object on our campus.

Videos of CatchBob!:

• The long video (3:30, .mov, 15.8Mb) can be downloaded here.
• The short version (1:20, .mov, 8.3Mb) can be downloaded there.

Re-blogged from Smart Mobs

From the conference's website 

CSCW 2006 is the premier venue for Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Please join us for the 20^th Anniversary of the first CSCW meeting! We have a number of special events planned as part of our Anniversary celebration.

CSCW has consistently been at the leading edge of thinking about the role of coordination and communication technologies in our lives. With your help, CSCW 2006 will play an important role in continuing this tradition. Come and help us make our 20^th Anniversary of CSCW a stimulating and exciting event.

New this year, CSCW will be running SIGCHI Best Awards programs for the Papers and Notes submission categories. These awards will recognize the most outstanding submissions in these categories.

Contemporary robots and other cognitive artifacts are not yet ready to autonomously operate in complex real world environments. One of the major reasons for this failure in creating cognitive situated systems is the difficulty in the handling of incomplete knowledge and uncertainty.

 

By taking up inspiration from the brains of mammals, including humans, the BACS project will investigate and apply Bayesian models and approaches in order to develop artificial cognitive systems that can carry out complex tasks in real world environments. The Bayesian approach will be used to model different levels of brain function within a coherent framework, from neural functions up to complex behaviors. The Bayesian models will be validated and adapted as necessary according to neuro-physiological data from rats and humans and through psychophysical experiments on humans. The Bayesian approach will also be used to develop four artificial cognitive systems concerned with (i) autonomous navigation, (ii) multi-modal perception and reconstruction of the environment, (iii) semantic facial motion tracking, and (iv) human body motion recognition and behavior analysis. The conducted research shall result in a consistent Bayesian framework offering enhanced tools for probabilistic reasoning in complex real world situations. The performance will be demonstrated through its applications to driver assistant systems and 3D mapping, both very complex real world tasks.

 

BBC News, july 17, 2006

BBC reports that researchers from University of Manchester are developing a new biologically-inspired computer, which mimics the complex interactions between brain neurons.

The computer will be designed with the aim of modelling large numbers of neurons in real time and to track patterns of neural spikes as they occur in the brain. It will be built using large numbers of simple microprocessors designed to interact like the networks of neurons found in the brain. The aim will be to place dozens of microprocessors on single silicon chip reducing the cost and power consumption of the computer.

Read the original article

The Significance of Sigma Neurofeedback Training on Sleep Spindles and Aspects of Declarative Memory.

Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback. 2006 Jul 15;

Authors: Berner I, Schabus M, Wienerroither T, Klimesch W

The functional significance of sleep spindles for overnight memory consolidation and general learning aptitude as well as the effect of four 10-minute sessions of spindle frequency (11.6-16 Hz, sigma) neurofeedback-training on subsequent sleep spindle activity and overnight performance change was investigated. Before sleep, subjects were trained on a paired-associate word list task after having received either neurofeedback training (NFT) or pseudofeedback training (PFT).Although NFT had no significant impact on subsequent spindle activity and behavioral outcomes, there was a trend for enhanced sigma band-power during NREM (stage 2 to 4) sleep after NFT as compared to PFT. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation between spindle activity during slow wave sleep (in the first night half) and overall memory performance was revealed. The results support the view that the considerable inter-individual variance in sleep spindle activity can at least be partly explained by differences in the ability to acquire new declarative information.We conclude that the short NFT before sleep was not sufficient to efficiently enhance phasic spindle activity and/or to influence memory processing. NFT was, however, successful in increasing sigma power, presumably because sigma NFT effects become more easily evident in actually trained frequency bands than in associated phasic spindle activity.