Psyche: A mobile application connecting students to school counselors

Capstone Project submitted to the Department of Engineering, Ashesi University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering, April 2019This paper explores the problem of depression among university students and provides a means by which the students can be linked to a mental health professional, in order to receive guidance. This system is made up of a mobile application and an electrical system. The mobile application includes a chat system that allows the students to contact available counselors, and also, includes a virtual reality interface that allows the user to relax in a virtual environment of choice while listening to an audio of choice. This could be an instrumental, or natural sounds like the wind blowing, rain drops and othersa. The electrical system takes in the user’s temperature and heart rate and sends these data to the cloud database, to be displayed to the counselor in the mobile application as per the counselor’s request.Ashesi Universit

EEG based Major Depressive disorder and Bipolar disorder detection using Neural Networks: A review

Mental disorders represent critical public health challenges as they are leading contributors to the global burden of disease and intensely influence social and financial welfare of individuals. The present comprehensive review concentrate on the two mental disorders: Major depressive Disorder (MDD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD) with noteworthy publications during the last ten years. There is a big need nowadays for phenotypic characterization of psychiatric disorders with biomarkers. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals could offer a rich signature for MDD and BD and then they could improve understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms underling these mental disorders. In this review, we focus on the literature works adopting neural networks fed by EEG signals. Among those studies using EEG and neural networks, we have discussed a variety of EEG based protocols, biomarkers and public datasets for depression and bipolar disorder detection. We conclude with a discussion and valuable recommendations that will help to improve the reliability of developed models and for more accurate and more deterministic computational intelligence based systems in psychiatry. This review will prove to be a structured and valuable initial point for the researchers working on depression and bipolar disorders recognition by using EEG signals.Comment: 29 pages,2 figures and 18 Table

ManneqKit Cards:A Kinesthetic Empathic Design Tool Communicating Depression Experiences

While depression is a mood disorder with significant societal impact, the experiences of people living with depression are yet not easy to access. HCI’s tenet to understand users, particularly addressed by the empathic design approach, has prioritized verbal communication of such experiences. We introduce ManneqKit, a kinesthetic empathic design tool consisting of 15 cards with bodily postures and vignettes leveraging the nonverbal aspects of depression experiences. We report ManneqKit’s co-design with 10 therapists, its piloting with 4 therapists and 10 non-therapists, and evaluation through design workshops with 9 interaction designers. Findings indicate cards’ ability to elicit non-therapists’ increased empathy, and richer emotional depictions when compared to text-based description of depression symptoms. We discuss the value of these findings for interaction design in supporting richer understanding of vulnerable users experiencing depression, for more sensitive conceptual designs in the ideation stage, and more nuanced ethical values underpinning the overall design process

Exploring English as an Additional Language Students’ Perceived Engagement in and Experience of Content Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention Through Immersive Virtual Reality Games

This thesis aimed to explore whether headset-mounted display virtual reality (HMD VR) games could serve as an innovative approach to enhance content vocabulary learning and foster subject content knowledge of Years 7 and 8 Middle Eastern students. Specifically, it aimed to measure these students’ content specific vocabulary acquisition and retention, examine their perceptions of and attitudes towards VR game-based learning, and offer best practices for educational institutions that support culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) learners

Life Sciences Program Tasks and Bibliography for FY 1997

This document includes information on all peer reviewed projects funded by the Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, Life Sciences Division during fiscal year 1997. This document will be published annually and made available to scientists in the space life sciences field both as a hard copy and as an interactive internet web page

THE ROLE OF JAVANESE CULTURE IN CHARACTER BUILDING AT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Nowadays, character education becomes a major concern in Indonesia. Character development has been done by various strategy, but the results is yet to be seen. Character development should beginin elementary school in order that the children's charactercould formed early so that it could be developed until they are mature. One of the efforts of character building is integrating the local wisdom in learning. One of them is the Javanese culture. Javanese culture has a variety of rules called the "unggah-ungguh" that always give good models to the public community, especially to the Javanese. Along with the times, the Javanese culture that upholds ethics began to degraded and replaced by foreign cultures that came later. The parents’ roles in instilling the Javanese culture to their children also decreased gradually. This paper will examine the Javanese culture’s roles toward the character building in elementary schools’ students. Descriptive method supported by a depth review of the literature and the previous studies is used in this paper as a method. Based on the results of these reviews, we obtain some information about the types and mechanisms of Javanese culture in character building of students, especially elementary school students