Resonating Experiences of Self and Others enabled by a Tangible Somaesthetic Design

Digitalization is penetrating every aspect of everyday life including a human's heart beating, which can easily be sensed by wearable sensors and displayed for others to see, feel, and potentially "bodily resonate" with. Previous work in studying human interactions and interaction designs with physiological data, such as a heart's pulse rate, have argued that feeding it back to the users may, for example support users' mindfulness and self-awareness during various everyday activities and ultimately support their wellbeing. Inspired by Somaesthetics as a discipline, which focuses on an appreciation of the living body's role in all our experiences, we designed and explored mobile tangible heart beat displays, which enable rich forms of bodily experiencing oneself and others in social proximity. In this paper, we first report on the design process of tangible heart displays and then present results of a field study with 30 pairs of participants. Participants were asked to use the tangible heart displays during watching movies together and report their experience in three different heart display conditions (i.e., displaying their own heart beat, their partner's heart beat, and watching a movie without a heart display). We found, for example that participants reported significant effects in experiencing sensory immersion when they felt their own heart beats compared to the condition without any heart beat display, and that feeling their partner's heart beats resulted in significant effects on social experience. We refer to resonance theory to discuss the results, highlighting the potential of how ubiquitous technology could utilize physiological data to provide resonance in a modern society facing social acceleration.Comment: 18 page

Assistive translation technology for deaf people: translating into and animating Irish sign language

Machine Translation (MT) for sign languages (SLs) can facilitate communication between Deaf and hearing people by translating information into the native and preferred language of the individuals. In this paper, we discuss automatic translation from English to Irish SL (ISL) in the domain of airport information. We describe our data collection processes and the architecture of the MaTrEx system used for our translation work. This is followed by an outline of the additional animation phase that transforms the translated output into animated ISL. Through a set of experiments, evaluated both automatically and manually, we show that MT has the potential to assist Deaf people by providing information in their first language

Maturana’s Autopoietic Hermeneutics Versus Turing’s Causal Methodology for Explaining Cognition (Reply to A. Kravchenko (2007) Whence the autonomy? A comment on Harnad and Dror (2006)

Kravchenko (2007) suggests replacing Turing’s suggested method for explaining cognizers’ cognitive capacity through autonomous robotic modelling by ‘autopoeisis, Maturana’s extremely vague metaphor for the relations and interactions among organisms and their environments. I suggest that this would be an exercise in hermeneutics rather than causal explanation

Magnetoencephalography in Stroke Recovery and Rehabilitation

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a non-invasive neurophysiological technique used to study the cerebral cortex. Currently, MEG is mainly used clinically to localize epileptic foci and eloquent brain areas in order to avoid damage during neurosurgery. MEG might, however, also be of help in monitoring stroke recovery and rehabilitation. This review focuses on experimental use of MEG in neurorehabilitation. MEG has been employed to detect early modifications in neuroplasticity and connectivity, but there is insufficient evidence as to whether these methods are sensitive enough to be used as a clinical diagnostic test. MEG has also been exploited to derive the relationship between brain activity and movement kinematics for a motor-based brain-computer interface. In the current body of experimental research, MEG appears to be a powerful tool in neurorehabilitation, but it is necessary to produce new data to confirm its clinical utility

Artspeak : articulating artistic process across cultural boundaries through digital theatre

In early 2009, researchers in the English Department of the University of Amsterdam collaborated with researchers in the Drama Department, Deakin University, Australia on a project which brought English as a Second Language students from The Netherlands into the rehearsal studio of Australian students engaged in play-building on Australian themes. The project aims were multiple and interconnected. We extended a language acquisition framework established by the Dutch investigators in previous collaborations with the Universities of Venice and Southampton, and combined this with an investigation of ways to harness technology in order to teach Australian students to communicate with and about their art. The Dutch language students were prompted to develop art-related language literacy (description, interpretation, criticism), through live, video-streamed interaction with drama students in Australia at critical points in the development of a group-devised performance (conception, rehearsal, performance). The Australian student improved their capacity to articulate the aims and processes which drove their art-making by illuminating the art-making process for the Dutch students, and providing them with a real-life context for the use of extended vocabulary whilst making them partners in the process of shaping the work. All participants engaged in the common task of assessing the capacity of the art work produced to communicate meaning to a non-Australian audience.<br /

A new head-mounted display-based augmented reality system in neurosurgical oncology: a study on phantom

Purpose: Benefits of minimally invasive neurosurgery mandate the development of ergonomic paradigms for neuronavigation. Augmented Reality (AR) systems can overcome the shortcomings of commercial neuronavigators. The aim of this work is to apply a novel AR system, based on a head-mounted stereoscopic video see-through display, as an aid in complex neurological lesion targeting. Effectiveness was investigated on a newly designed patient-specific head mannequin featuring an anatomically realistic brain phantom with embedded synthetically created tumors and eloquent areas. Materials and methods: A two-phase evaluation process was adopted in a simulated small tumor resection adjacent to Brocaâ\u80\u99s area. Phase I involved nine subjects without neurosurgical training in performing spatial judgment tasks. In Phase II, three surgeons were involved in assessing the effectiveness of the AR-neuronavigator in performing brain tumor targeting on a patient-specific head phantom. Results: Phase I revealed the ability of the AR scene to evoke depth perception under different visualization modalities. Phase II confirmed the potentialities of the AR-neuronavigator in aiding the determination of the optimal surgical access to the surgical target. Conclusions: The AR-neuronavigator is intuitive, easy-to-use, and provides three-dimensional augmented information in a perceptually-correct way. The system proved to be effective in guiding skin incision, craniotomy, and lesion targeting. The preliminary results encourage a structured study to prove clinical effectiveness. Moreover, our testing platform might be used to facilitate training in brain tumour resection procedures