Measurement of Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability with Wearable Devices: A Systematic Review

Wearables are a ubiquitous trend in both commercial and academic settings as they easily enable tracking and monitoring of physiological parameters such as heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV). This paper presents a literature review to survey the existing Neuro-Information-Systems (NeuroIS) literature on HR and HRV with a focus on measurement based on wearable devices. We addressed the following four research questions: Who published HR and HRV research? What kind of HR and HRV research has been published? With which wearable devices was HR and HRV measured? How reliable and valid are HR and HRV measurements based on wearable devices? Our review provides answers to these questions and concludes that further efforts are needed to advance the field from both a theoretical and methodological perspective

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

And I half turn to go: invocatio and negation of the Public

This writing is the result of a practice-as-research project that I have undertaken as a poet, performance and sound artist. The works that I have produced dwell thematically and formally on themes of broken temporality, abject subjects, waste time and spaces, and are a response to the period coincident (London and the UK, 2010-2017) with this research. The writing is intended to create a context, or map, of where and when I made the performances and recordings, the pressures and atmospheres they responded to. During this time, broadly welfare-statist senses of “public” as polity, institutions and space have contorted under pressure from a rapacious neoliberalism and the rise of nativist and racist right-wing politics, exemplified by the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. Both forces are hostile to the model of rights-bearing citizenship as the universality embodied in “stranger relationality”, which Michael Warner describes as a necessity for a sense of public (2002, p.7). This struggle feeds into debates concerning what both "public" and “citizen” mean as political concepts. I use relational aesthetics as an example of a communitarian tendency that superficially might seem to be opposed to dominant political tendencies hostile to the idea of a universal public. In this, it follows both nativist and neoliberal tendencies; in its artistic strategies it also prioritises voluntaristic “engagement” over contemplation. In both these matters, it replicates certain neoliberal models of ideal subjecthood, in which rights are replaced by privileges. This is, for me, a parallel to the tension between the Romantic lumpenprole figure of “artist” and the valorised, entrepreneurial “creative worker”. As a counterbalance, I look at a waste ground fly-tipping site in east London that I have called the Bike Cemetery. This place had at one time been occupied by an anonymous bricoleur who left an extraordinary mural comprising of collaged detritus and text on a wall supporting a motorway embankment. I take the rubbish strewn site, the mural and its creator as a constellation in themselves, a manifestation of stranger-relationality and the now abjected temporality of social democracy. In keeping with my approach to my artistic work, I use Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory (Benjamin, 1998) as a tool for looking at the ways in which ideas can present through constellations of images and detritus, making the experience of hermeneutic labour almost haptic — a wandering across and through fragments. I use materials such as “scalies” (the figures that populate the architects’ renderings printed on the hoardings put up around the sites of speculative housing developments), UK public order legislation and the history of the temperance movement. Central to this mapping which attempts to delineate an emergent form of contemporary subjectivity, is an idea of “public”, in the dual and related sense of a political collectivity that can be addressed or appealed to and the political/social artefacts of public “space” and “services” in a welfare state. This response also necessitates, for a vocal and verbal artist such as myself, a consideration of the rhetorical structures at play: much that presents as in-vocation in political discourse, the “will of the People”, for example, is actually e-vocation — allegory to the invocation’s symbol, belonging to the temporality of waste (see Viney, 2016), ruptured or halted teleology (Agamben, 2009), the time of addiction, the time of performance. I consider and have developed my work as an artist in relation to these questions: Is a performer “being public”? Is the audience an instantiation of the public? Where are “we” and what are “we” when (in) public? How can a performance address the public-as-public, which is to say, as strangers; what rhetoric, what form of address can be used? Can “public” be in-voked or e-voked by a performer? What part does my voice play as a vehicle of “in” or “e” vocation? What appropriate temporality can performance occupy or evoke at this time? How are tropes (turns, postures, images) of “national abjects” to be used without rendering them as decorative motifs for the creative class

Thine Is the Kingdom: The Political Thought of 21st Century Evangelicalism

Despite renewed attention to religion and ethics in political theory, there is a notable absence of inquiry into evangelicalism. Social scientists have studied Christian right policy in the late 20th century, but how has the movement shifted in the new millennium and what are the theoretical beliefs that undergird those shifts? By reading popular devotional writings as political texts, this dissertation distills a three-part evangelical political thought: 1) a theory of time in which teleological eternity complements retroactive re-birth; 2) a theory of being wherein evangelicals learn to strive after their godly potential through a process of emotional self-regulation; and 3) a theory of personhood wherein identity develops concurrently within the evangelical subculture and today’s (neo)liberal ethos. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that for the last fifteen years, an evangelical revival has been transforming the movement from a policy-driven politics to an ontologically driven politics—innovatively pivoting it away from the Christian right. Whereas most secular observers focus on the internal contradictions of evangelicalism, my close reading and interpretation of devotional texts instead describes a series of creative tensions that work to strengthen religious belief, support a strategic revivalism, and catalyze evangelicalism as a new kind of socio-political movement

Improving Access and Mental Health for Youth Through Virtual Models of Care

The overall objective of this research is to evaluate the use of a mobile health smartphone application (app) to improve the mental health of youth between the ages of 14–25 years, with symptoms of anxiety/depression. This project includes 115 youth who are accessing outpatient mental health services at one of three hospitals and two community agencies. The youth and care providers are using eHealth technology to enhance care. The technology uses mobile questionnaires to help promote self-assessment and track changes to support the plan of care. The technology also allows secure virtual treatment visits that youth can participate in through mobile devices. This longitudinal study uses participatory action research with mixed methods. The majority of participants identified themselves as Caucasian (66.9%). Expectedly, the demographics revealed that Anxiety Disorders and Mood Disorders were highly prevalent within the sample (71.9% and 67.5% respectively). Findings from the qualitative summary established that both staff and youth found the software and platform beneficial

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.* The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: IoT and AI solutions for e-health; biomedical and health informatics; behavior and activity monitoring; behavior and activity monitoring; and wellbeing technology. *This conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Repositioning Neuroaesthetics Through Contemporary Art

Neuroaesthetics has tended to privilege neuroscientific understandings of art, eliding centuries of art historical research on perception and culture. Instead, this dissertation extends neuroaesthetic research to examine the specific social, sensorial and perceptual processes occurring as artworks are encountered in exhibition contexts. How does neuroaesthetic perception operate in contemporary artworks? What modes of cognitive address are involved? How can neuroaesthetic engagement facilitate embodied knowledges? This dissertation first inquires into the neuroaesthetic literature in order to establish its neuroscientific foundations, and then advances a perceptual standpoint stemming from art and art history. Drawing from feminist theories of embodiment, I reposition neuroaesthetics to incorporate art historical inquiries into body and mind through direct engagement with art. I argue that such a revised neuroaesthic perception must take into account post-humanist troublings of nature/culture dichotomies. I also suggest that the paradigm for embodied perception that has emerged from both cognitive neuroscience and affect theory can expand neuroaesthetic understanding. My investigation has led me to first-hand experience as a research subject of neuroscience experiments, which show that current fMRI contexts in fact delimit the perception of art and inhibit possible neuroaesthetic significance. Instead, I undertake neuroaesthetic research in exhibition contexts where self-reflexive awareness facilitates insights into perception and cognition that are inaccessible within the epistemological conditions of neuroscience labs. The first case study examines how an installation by the FASTWÜRMS collective reveals cognitive processes of abduction by inviting navigation through an infinitely complex web of objects and images. Turning from association to visual cognition, I consider how Olafur Eliasson’s immersive light installations manipulate colour perception thereby facilitating critical awareness of techno-mediated environments. Third, my analysis of a conceptual work by Kristin Lucas explores how the performance of digital and legal technology invites embodied transformations. Finally, I examine how the affective tensions produced in a video by Omer Fast activate an awareness of intersubjective communication that corresponds with recent neuroscientific developments in mirror-neuron theory. By taking contemporary artworks as its focus, the dissertation extends neuroaesthetic inquiry to demonstrate contextual understandings of how the cognitive processes of art constitute physiological engagements between body, brain and world

Non-western rendition of ambient rhetoric of Khajuraho monuments.

This dissertation develops an ambient rhetoric: a living practice that is more disclosive than communicative, more entangled than intersectional, and more subtle than explicit and evidential. Rather than exploring the symbology, iconography, texture, and artistic integrity of Khajuraho monuments, I claim that Khajuraho monuments aim at convincing visitors with their persuadability and affectability inherent in their material bases, architectural panels, fractal design, allegorical cast, aura of attunement, and the environment in which the monument complex is nestled. Khajuraho groups of monuments in Central India, matchless in their monumentality, dynamic in their adjustment to the shifting socio-politico-cultural landscape in the world, fantastic in their amenability to entanglement, and susceptible to their intra-action with cutting-edge digital tools and technology, have proved to be a vibrant hub for those who—constrained by the deficit model of rhetoric as a logic of supplementation and also by the exploitative and extractive model of rhetoric that valorises human-centric rhetorical approach to persuasive assemblage—venture into exploring the holistic version of the rhetoric predicated on the principle of a third term. The monument complex’s persuadability rests not just on its symbology but on its enduring sandstone that lays the material basis for the construction of its majestic architecture, splendid sculpture, stunning superstructure, gorgeous ground plan, fractal design, strategic placement of the artifacts, the upward projection of the superstructure exposed to the four elements, the lapidary locale of the monuments nestled in an environment that escapes any intelligent guess as to when, how, and why it participates in revealing the monument complex’s rhetoricity

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationPeaceful Uprising grew out of civil disobedience actions taken in 2008 by Tim DeChristopher on behalf of the environment, when he illegally bid on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land parcels to withhold them from businesses that would exploit that land. The resulting collective is the focus of this dissertation. The examination of the collective Peaceful Uprising reveals how collectivity is essential to social protest and how it is a rhetorical process that is essential to social movement rhetoric. This collectivity is defined as both a group that makes a whole and the qualities that make up and maintain that group, such as feelings of belonging, staying power, and an affect of hope. Additionally, these are the major rhetorical processes by which a social movement creates and maintains a sense of the collective. In understanding how collectivity is created and maintained within social movements, machines of mobilization-the active creation and deployment of a collectivist cultural assemblage focused on social protest and change-is a unique heuristic that allows social movement rhetoric scholars to better understand the rhetorical invention of collectivity. The rhetorical processes of collectivity and machines of mobilization are primarily examined through the participatory critical research (PCR) method, wherein I became part of the Peaceful Uprising movement in order to critically observe how they, as a machine of mobilization, interact with the state; how they use music/song rhetorically, particularly the utilization of citationality; and their use of place/space, especially in a post-9/11 world of restrictions