Evaluating a sensor of skin conductance to assess dental anxiety

Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional (Bioinformática), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015The anxiety related problems that adult population experience, are a common issue in Dental Practice. To overcome these problems it would be helpful to have an objective measure of the current anxiety of the patient. With this information, it should be possible to link the measured anxiety to an automated system that could distract the patient by altering the surrounding environment, i.e. Ambient Intelligence. This project consisted in measuring the skin conductance signal and correlating the responses related with documented dental stressful procedures. This was executed in a real clinical environment. Dental anxiety was assessed in over 70 patients with a 3 question survey using the Likert scale. Each answer was registered together with the level of skin conductance measured with a sensor placed in the patient fingers. The results showed a significant association between the dental anxiety score on two of the questions and the quantified skin electrodermal response. These findings aim to help design a future system based on ambient intelligence to distract and reduce dental anxiety during treatment.Uma parte significativa da população adulta tem problemas provocados pela ansiedade originada com a ida à consulta de Medicina Dentária. Seria vantajoso existir uma avaliação objetiva do nível de ansiedade do paciente durante a consulta para se ultrapassar estes problemas. Com esta informação seria possível alterar o ambiente envolvente através da ligação a um sistema automatizado inteligente para a distração do paciente durante a consulta. Este projeto consistiu na medição do sinal de condutividade da pele e correlação desta com as respostas a um questionário relacionado com atos dentários reconhecidos como causadores de grande ansiedade dentária. A ansiedade dentária foi avaliada em cerca de setenta pacientes por um questionário de três perguntas utilizando uma escala de Likert. Simultaneamente foi medida a condutividade da pele por um sensor colocado nos dedos da mão. Os resultados mostram uma associação significativa entre o nível de ansiedade obtido em duas das questões e a alteração da condutividade da pele. Estes resultados visam fornecer uma base para desenhar um futuro sistema de Ambiente Inteligente para distração da ansiedade dentária

VirtualMindTrial: An Intelligent Questionnaire System for Clinical Trail Recruitment

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on January 20, 2011.Dissertation advisor: Yugyung Lee.Vita.Includes bibliographic references (pages 76-80).Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2010.The recruitment of human subjects for clinical trials research is a critically important step in the discovery of new cures for diseases. Volunteers are subjected to an elaborate questionnaire process in current recruitment methodologies. Although the questionnaire process is extremely important in clinical trial recruitment, it is inefficient due to redundancy and lack of a systematic approach. Ideally, questionnaire generation and implementation must be guided by intelligent heuristics that minimize redundancy and inconsistency. In this thesis, an intelligent approach to questionnaire flow called VirtualMindTrial is proposed. Given a set of textual inclusion/exclusion clinical trial eligibility criteria and data available from diverse sources such as Microsoft HealthVault, VirtualMindTrial is able to 1) filter known criteria, 2) add associative criteria based on selected criteria, 3) form a neighborhood of patients who satisfy similar criteria, and 4) generate a dynamic questionnaire flow for screening patients. The questionnaire has been implemented using a visual 3-D environment to help volunteer subjects experience a realistic screening process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in terms of dynamic questionnaire flow generation and in enhancing the user experience with virtual worlds. A visual prototype system has been developed as part of the thesis to illustrate the enhanced efficiency and quality of screening patients with psychiatric disorders for clinical research.Abstract -- Illustrations -- Tables -- List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Related Work -- VirtualMindTrial Framework -- VirtualMindTrial System Architecture -- VirtualMindTrial Interface -- Evaluation -- Conclusion and Future Work -- References -- Vita

The Intrepid project - biosensor-enhanced virtual therapy for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorders

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a psychiatric disorder characterized by a constant and unspecific anxiety that interferes with daily-life activities. Together with the cognitive-behavioural treatments, relaxation represents a useful approach for the treatment of GAD, but it has the limitation that it is hard to be learned. To overcome this limitation we propose the use of biofeedback enhanced virtual reality (VR) to facilitate the relaxation process. The VR relaxation experience will be strengthened by the use of a mobile phone able to track and visualize, in an outpatient setting too, the physiological data of the patients. To test this concept, we planned a randomized controlled trial (NCT00602212), including three groups of 15 patients each (for a total of 75 patients): (1) the VR group, (2) the non-VR group and (3) the waiting list (WL) group. This controlled trial will be able to evaluate the effects of the use of VR in relaxation while preserving the benefits of randomization to reduce bias

2006, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 4, 2006 and December 19, 2006