Combining brain-computer interfaces and assistive technologies: state-of-the-art and challenges

In recent years, new research has brought the field of EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) out of its infancy and into a phase of relative maturity through many demonstrated prototypes such as brain-controlled wheelchairs, keyboards, and computer games. With this proof-of-concept phase in the past, the time is now ripe to focus on the development of practical BCI technologies that can be brought out of the lab and into real-world applications. In particular, we focus on the prospect of improving the lives of countless disabled individuals through a combination of BCI technology with existing assistive technologies (AT). In pursuit of more practical BCIs for use outside of the lab, in this paper, we identify four application areas where disabled individuals could greatly benefit from advancements in BCI technology, namely,“Communication and Control”, “Motor Substitution”, “Entertainment”, and “Motor Recovery”. We review the current state of the art and possible future developments, while discussing the main research issues in these four areas. In particular, we expect the most progress in the development of technologies such as hybrid BCI architectures, user-machine adaptation algorithms, the exploitation of users’ mental states for BCI reliability and confidence measures, the incorporation of principles in human-computer interaction (HCI) to improve BCI usability, and the development of novel BCI technology including better EEG devices

Human-centred design methods : developing scenarios for robot assisted play informed by user panels and field trials

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ Copyright ElsevierThis article describes the user-centred development of play scenarios for robot assisted play, as part of the multidisciplinary IROMEC1 project that develops a novel robotic toy for children with special needs. The project investigates how robotic toys can become social mediators, encouraging children with special needs to discover a range of play styles, from solitary to collaborative play (with peers, carers/teachers, parents, etc.). This article explains the developmental process of constructing relevant play scenarios for children with different special needs. Results are presented from consultation with panel of experts (therapists, teachers, parents) who advised on the play needs for the various target user groups and who helped investigate how robotic toys could be used as a play tool to assist in the children’s development. Examples from experimental investigations are provided which have informed the development of scenarios throughout the design process. We conclude by pointing out the potential benefit of this work to a variety of research projects and applications involving human–robot interactions.Peer reviewe

Measuring Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights

© Crown Copyright 2014. You may re-use this information (excluding logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence. To view this licence, visit http://www.nationalarchives.gov. uk/doc/open-government-licence/ Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concernedThe review is wide-ranging in scope and overall our findings evidence a lack of appreciation among those producing research for the high-level principles of measurement and assessment of scale. To date, the approaches adopted by industry seem more designed for internal consumption and are usually contingent on particular technologies and/or sector perspectives. Typically, there is a lack of transparency in the methodologies and data used to form the basis of claims, making much of this an unreliable basis for policy formulation. The research approaches we found are characterised by a number of features that can be summarised as a preference for reactive approaches that look to establish snapshots of an important issue at the time of investigation. Most studies are ad hoc in nature and on the whole we found a lack of sustained longitudinal approaches that would develop the appreciation of change. Typically the studies are designed to address specific hypotheses that might serve to support the position of the particular commissioning body. To help bring some structure to this area, we propose a framework for the assessment of the volume of infringement in each different area. The underlying aim is to draw out a common approach wherever possible in each area, rather than being drawn initially to the differences in each field. We advocate on-going survey tracking of the attitudes, perceptions and, where practical, behaviours of both perpetrators and claimants in IP infringement. Clearly, the nature of perpetrators, claimants and enforcement differs within each IPR but in our view the assessment for each IPR should include all of these elements. It is important to clarify that the key element of the survey structure is the adoption of a survey sampling methodology and smaller volumes of representative participation. Once selection is given the appropriate priority, a traditional offline survey will have a part to play, but as the opportunity arises, new technological methodologies, particularly for the voluntary monitoring of online behaviour, can add additional detail to the overall assessment of the scale of activity. This framework can be applied within each of the IP right sectors: copyright, trademarks,patents, and design rights. It may well be that the costs involved with this common approach could be mitigated by a syndicated approach to the survey elements. Indeed, a syndicated approach has a number of advantages in addition to cost. It could be designed to reduce any tendency either to hide inappropriate/illegal activity or alternatively exaggerate its volume to fit with the theme of the survey. It also has the scope to allow for monthly assessments of attitudes rather than being vulnerable to unmeasured seasonal impacts

PROCEDURAL MUSIC GENERATION AND ADAPTATION BASED ON GAME STATE

Video game developers attempt to convey moods to emphasize their game\u27s narrative. Events that occur within the game usually convey success or failure in some way meaningful to the story\u27s progress. Ideally, when these events occur, the intended change in mood should be perceivable to the player. One way of doing so is to change the music. This requires musical tracks to represent many possible moods, states and game events. This can be very taxing on composers, and encoding the control flow (when to transition) of the tracks can prove to be tricky as well. This thesis presents AUD.js, a system developed for procedural music generation for JavaScript-based web games. By taking input from game events, the system can create music corresponding to various Western perceptions of music mood. The system was trained with classic video game music. Game development students rated the mood of 80 pieces, after which statistical representations of those pieces were extracted and added into AUD.js. AUD.js can adapt its generated music to new sets of input parameters, thereby updating the perceived mood of the generated music at runtime. We conducted A/B tests comparing static music, both composed and computer-generated, to dynamically adapting music. We find that AUD.js provides reasonably effective music for games, but that adaptiveness of the music does not necessarily improve player experience over composed music. By conducting a user study during Global Game Jam 2014, we also find that since AUD.js provides a software solution to music composition, it can be a useful tool for game music integration under time pressure

Interactive Digital Music: Enhancing Listener Engagement with Commercial Music

Listeners have long been inspired to interact with music and create new representations of popular releases. Vinyl offered many opportunities to reappropriate chart music, from scratching and tempo manipulation to mixing multiple songs together. More recently, artists could engage their audience to interact with their music by offering mix-stems online for experimentation and sharing. With the extended processing power of mobile devices, the opportunities for interactive music are dramatically increasing. This paper presents research that demonstrates a novel approach to interactive digital music. The research looks at the emergent format of the album app and extends existing paradigms of interactive music playback. The novel album app designed in this research presents a new opportunity for listeners to engage with recorded content by allowing them to explore alternative takes, renditions of a given song in multiple genres, and by allowing direct interaction with embedded mix-stems. The resultant audio remains true to the artist and producer’s studio vision; it is user-influenced, but machine-controlled. The research is conducted in collaboration with artist Daisy and The Dark and was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council

A review of the evidence on the use of ICT in the Early Years Foundation Stage

This report reviewed existing evidence on the potential of technology to support the development of educational policy and practice in the context of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Reference is made to the use of ICT by young children from aged birth to five years and its potential impacts, positive and negative on their cognitive, social, emotional educational, visual and physical development

Form-Aware, Real-Time Adaptive Music Generation for Interactive Experiences

Many experiences offered to the public through interactive theatre, theme parks, video games, and virtual environments use music to complement the participants’ activity. There is a range of approaches to this, from straightforward playback of ‘stings’, to looped phrases, to on-the-fly note generation. Within the latter, traditional genres and forms are often not represented, with the music instead being typically loose in form and structure. We present work in progress on a new method for realtime music generation that can preserve traditional musical genres whilst being reactive in form to the activities of participants. The results of simulating participant trajectories and the effect this has on the music generation algorithms are presented, showing that the approach can successfully handle variable length forms whilst remaining substantially within the given musical style

Is change on the horizon for Maori and Pacifica female high school students when it comes to ICT?

This paper explores some of the factors that discourage the participation of Māori and Pacific girls in ICT in New Zealand. Despite many ICT job opportunities, there has been a steady decrease in the percentage of girls, especial Māori and Pacific girls entering into ICT study, and pursuing ICT careers. This study used a modified version of the conceptual framework designed by Bernhardt (2014) based on the 'STEMcell' model. The STEMcell framework was used to explores the factors that discourage participation in ICT through such concepts as cultural, social, structural and social IT that contribute to the likelihood of student’s career choice in ICT. An online questionnaire gathered data from year 11 students studying at high schools within Wellington, New Zealand. The findings indicated that Pacific girl’s more than Māori girls reported that their family members were seen as role models, which could impact on their future career choices. The statistical results also show that stereotypes are still alive in both Māori and Pacific year 11 student’s perceptions and that both Pacific and Māori girls from year 11 are unlikely to follow a career in ICT. Currently, the number of Māori and Pacific girls enrolling in ICT subjects at secondary school is still substantially below that for boys and, until changes are made, Māori and Pacific girls going into the industry will be in the minority

Automated manipulation of musical grammars to support episodic interactive experiences

Music is used to enhance the experience of participants and visitors in a range of settings including theatre, film, video games, installations and theme parks. These experiences may be interactive, contrastingly episodic and with variable duration. Hence, the musical accompaniment needs to be dynamic and to transition between contrasting music passages. In these contexts, computer generation of music may be necessary for practical reasons including distribution and cost. Automated and dynamic composition algorithms exist but are not well-suited to a highly interactive episodic context owing to transition-related problems including discontinuity, abruptness, extended repetitiveness and lack of musical granularity and musical form. Addressing these problems requires algorithms capable of reacting to participant behaviour and episodic change in order to generate formic music that is continuous and coherent during transitions. This thesis presents the Form-Aware Transitioning and Recovering Algorithm (FATRA) for realtime, adaptive, form-aware music generation to provide continuous musical accompaniment in episodic context. FATRA combines stochastic grammar adaptation and grammar merging in real time. The Form-Aware Transition Engine (FATE) implementation of FATRA estimates the time-occurrence of upcoming narrative transitions and generates a harmonic sequence as narrative accompaniment with a focus on coherent, form-aware music transitioning between music passages of contrasting character. Using FATE, FATRA has been evaluated in three perceptual user studies: An audioaugmented real museum experience, a computer-simulated museum experience and a music-focused online study detached from narrative. Music transitions of FATRA were benchmarked against common approaches of the video game industry, i.e. crossfading and direct transitions. The participants were overall content with the music of FATE during their experience. Transitions of FATE were significantly favoured against the crossfading benchmark and competitive against the direct transitions benchmark, without statistical significance for the latter comparison. In addition, technical evaluation demonstrated capabilities of FATRA including form generation, repetitiveness avoidance and style/form recovery in case of falsely predicted narrative transitions. Technical results along with perceptual preference and competitiveness against the benchmark approaches are deemed as positive and the structural advantages of FATRA, including form-aware transitioning, carry considerable potential for future research

The Effect of Interactive Music Therapy on Joint Attention Skills in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of interactive music sessions on joint attention behaviors in preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Joint attention, the ability to share attention to a stimulus with another person, is a key deficit in children with ASD. Lack of joint attention behaviors contributes to the limited social and verbal skills that characterize ASD; joint attention behaviors are the primary component of the early screening for ASD advocated by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Participants (N=6; 5 male, 1 female) were between 36 and 64 months old at the time of the study, and were recruited from the child development program at a large Midwestern university. All children were enrolled in classrooms with curricula designed specifically for children with ASD. A multiple treatment (within-subject) design was used, with three treatment conditions: interactive music therapy, non-music interactive play, and independent play. Participants experienced each condition six times for a total of 18 ten-minute sessions over a five-week period. Session order was randomized to control for order effect. Behavioral observation of videotaped sessions was used to determine both interaction (responding to a bid for joint attention) and requesting behavior (initiating joint attention). Visual analysis of data graphs and statistical analysis were used to determine treatment effect. Interaction behaviors were most frequent in the interactive music therapy sessions, with less interaction in non-music interactive play sessions, and much less interaction during independent play. Although the difference between was less significant for the two children with the best interaction skills prior to the study, overall, the between-subject ANOVA revealed a significant difference in interaction among all three conditions (F [2, 105] = 62.028, p < 0.001; Bonferroni p < 0.01 between all conditions). Requesting behavior was highly variable across sessions, regardless of treatment condition, although requesting was generally higher in the interactive conditions than in the independent play sessions. Implications, limitations, and opportunities for further research are discussed