Facial Expression Rendering in Medical Training Simulators: Current Status and Future Directions

Recent technological advances in robotic sensing and actuation methods have prompted development of a range of new medical training simulators with multiple feedback modalities. Learning to interpret facial expressions of a patient during medical examinations or procedures has been one of the key focus areas in medical training. This paper reviews facial expression rendering systems in medical training simulators that have been reported to date. Facial expression rendering approaches in other domains are also summarized to incorporate the knowledge from those works into developing systems for medical training simulators. Classifications and comparisons of medical training simulators with facial expression rendering are presented, and important design features, merits and limitations are outlined. Medical educators, students and developers are identified as the three key stakeholders involved with these systems and their considerations and needs are presented. Physical-virtual (hybrid) approaches provide multimodal feedback, present accurate facial expression rendering, and can simulate patients of different age, gender and ethnicity group; makes it more versatile than virtual and physical systems. The overall findings of this review and proposed future directions are beneficial to researchers interested in initiating or developing such facial expression rendering systems in medical training simulators.This work was supported by the Robopatient project funded by the EPSRC Grant No EP/T00519X/

‘Anthropomorphic drones’ and colonized bodies: William Gibson’s the peripheral

William Gibson tends to write in trilogies, as his first nine novels show. These series – the Sprawl, the Bridge, and the Blue Ant trilogies – are set in three different time periods and are populated by characters who reappear from one book to the next. Given this pattern in Gibson’s writing habits, 2014’s The Peripheral can be considered a new work, set in a separate universe from any of Gibson’s previous novels. However, in terms of its philosophical position, The Peripheral is the continuation of a career-long trajectory. Gibson’s work is consistently concerned with the relationship of the individual to their society and the interface between the two, as mediated through the senses. The Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy privileged vision as the most important of the senses, particularly in cyberspace where the body is left behind and engagement with virtual reality happens mainly through the eyes gazing on a computer screen. 2003’s Pattern Recognition, the first novel in the Blue Ant trilogy which went on to include Spook Country (2007) and Count Zero (2010), began to resituate the body and specifically the haptic as key to engaging with the world while The Peripheral takes this philosophical journey further, privileging the haptic as a key site of phenomenological engagement

Immersive Composition for Sensory Rehabilitation: 3D Visualisation, Surround Sound, and Synthesised Music to Provoke Catharsis and Healing

There is a wide range of sensory therapies using sound, music and visual stimuli. Some focus on soothing or distracting stimuli such as natural sounds or classical music as analgesic, while other approaches emphasize the active performance of producing music as therapy. This paper proposes an immersive multi-sensory Exposure Therapy for people suffering from anxiety disorders, based on a rich, detailed surround-soundscape. This soundscape is composed to include the users’ own idiosyncratic anxiety triggers as a form of habituation, and to provoke psychological catharsis, as a non-verbal, visceral and enveloping exposure. To accurately pinpoint the most effective sounds and to optimally compose the soundscape we will monitor the participants’ physiological responses such as electroencephalography, respiration, electromyography, and heart rate during exposure. We hypothesize that such physiologically optimized sensory landscapes will aid the development of future immersive therapies for various psychological conditions, Sound is a major trigger of anxiety, and auditory hypersensitivity is an extremely problematic symptom. Exposure to stress-inducing sounds can free anxiety sufferers from entrenched avoidance behaviors, teaching physiological coping strategies and encouraging resolution of the psychological issues agitated by the sound

Shame as a social phenomenon: A critical analysis of the concept of dispositional shame

An increased clinical interest in shame has been reflected in the growing number of research studies in this area. However, clinically-orientated empirical investigation has mostly been restricted to the investigation of individual differences in dispositional shame. This paper reviews recent work on dispositional shame but then argues that the primacy of this construct has been problematic in a number of ways. Most importantly, the notion of shame as a context-free intrapsychic variable has distracted clinical researchers from investigating the management and repair of experiences of shame and shameful identities, and has made the social constitution of shame less visible. Several suggestions are made for alternative ways in which susceptibility to shame could be conceptualised, which consider how shame might arise in certain contexts and as a product of particular social encounters. For example, persistent difficulties with shame may relate to the salience of stigmatising discourses within a particular social context, the roles or subject positions available to an individual, the establishment of a repertoire of context-relevant shame avoidance strategies and the personal meaning of shamefulness

Measuring and simulating haemodynamics due to geometric changes in facial expression

The human brain has evolved to be very adept at recognising imperfections in human skin. In particular, observing someone’s facial skin appearance is important in recognising when someone is ill, or when finding a suitable mate. It is therefore a key goal of computer graphics research to produce highly realistic renderings of skin. However, the optical processes that give rise to skin appearance are complex and subtle. To address this, computer graphics research has incorporated more and more sophisticated models of skin reflectance. These models are generally based on static concentrations of skin chromophores; melanin and haemoglobin. However, haemoglobin concentrations are far from static, as blood flow is directly caused by both changes in facial expression and emotional state. In this thesis, we explore how blood flow changes as a consequence of changing facial expression with the aim of producing more accurate models of skin appearance. To build an accurate model of blood flow, we base it on real-world measurements of blood concentrations over time. We describe, in detail, the steps required to obtain blood concentrations from photographs of a subject. These steps are then used to measure blood concentration maps for a series of expressions that define a wide gamut of human expression. From this, we define a blending algorithm that allows us to interpolate these maps to generate concentrations for other expressions. This technique, however, requires specialist equipment to capture the maps in the first place. We try to rectify this problem by investigating a direct link between changes in facial geometry and haemoglobin concentrations. This requires building a unique capture device that captures both simultaneously. Our analysis hints a direct linear connection between the two, paving the way for further investigatio