Trends in virtual reality technologies for the learning patient

NextMed convened the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 22 (MMVR 22) conference in 2016. Since 1992, the conference has brought together a diverse group of researchers to share creative solutions for the evolving challenge of integrating virtual reality tools into medical education. Virtual reality (VR) and its enabling technologies utilize hardware and software to simulate environments and encounters where users can interact and learn. The MMVR 22 symposium proceedings contain projects that support a variety of learners: medical students, practitioners, soldiers, and patients. This report will contemplate the trends in virtual reality technologies for patients navigating their medical and healthcare learning. The learning patient seeks more than intervention; they seek prevention. From virtual humans and environments to motion sensors and haptic devices, patients are surrounded by increasingly rich and transformative data-driven tools. Applied data enables VR applications to simulate experience, predict health outcomes, and motivate new behavior. The MMVR 22 presents investigations into the usability of wearable devices, the efficacy of avatar inclusion, and the viability of multi-player gaming. With increasing need for individualized and scalable programming, only committed open source efforts will align instructional designers, technology integrators, trainers, and clinicians. Curriculum and InstructionCurriculum and Instructio

Real-World Evolution Adapts Robot Morphology and Control to Hardware Limitations

For robots to handle the numerous factors that can affect them in the real world, they must adapt to changes and unexpected events. Evolutionary robotics tries to solve some of these issues by automatically optimizing a robot for a specific environment. Most of the research in this field, however, uses simplified representations of the robotic system in software simulations. The large gap between performance in simulation and the real world makes it challenging to transfer the resulting robots to the real world. In this paper, we apply real world multi-objective evolutionary optimization to optimize both control and morphology of a four-legged mammal-inspired robot. We change the supply voltage of the system, reducing the available torque and speed of all joints, and study how this affects both the fitness, as well as the morphology and control of the solutions. In addition to demonstrating that this real-world evolutionary scheme for morphology and control is indeed feasible with relatively few evaluations, we show that evolution under the different hardware limitations results in comparable performance for low and moderate speeds, and that the search achieves this by adapting both the control and the morphology of the robot.Comment: Accepted to the 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO

Exploring New Horizons in Evolutionary Design of Robots

International audienceThis introduction paper to the 2009 IROS workshop “Exploring new horizons in Evolutionary Design of Robots” considers the field of Evolutionary Robotics (ER) from the perspective of its potential users: roboticists. The core hypothesis motivating this field of research will be discussed, as well as the potential use of ER in a robot design process. Three main aspects of ER will be presented: (a) ER as an automatic parameter tuning procedure, which is the most mature application and is used to solve real robotics problem, (b) evolutionary-aided design, which may benefit the designer as an efficient tool to build robotic systems and (c) automatic synthesis, which corresponds to the automatic design of a mechatronic device. Critical issues will also be presented as well as current trends and pespectives in ER

Narcissus to a Man: Lifelogging, Technology and the Normativity of Truth

The growth of the practice of lifelogging, exploiting the capabilities provided by the exponential increase in computer storage, and using technologies such as SenseCam as well as location-based services, Web 2.0, social networking and photo-sharing sites, has led to a growing sense of unease, articulated in books such as Mayer-Schönberger's Delete, that the semi-permanent storage of memories could lead to problematic social consequences. This talk examines the arguments against lifelogging and storage, and argues that they seem less worrying when placed in the context of a wider debate about the nature of mind and memory and their relationship to our environment and the technology we use

Application of incremental technologies in considerations of transhumanist aesthetics – Project "Who nose"

Transhumanist speculations have been present in intellectual circles since the 1960s. The term "transhumanism" was coined in 1957 by biologist Julian Huxley, who defined it as "man remaining man, but transcending himself by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature". Will the boundaries of aesthetics remain untouched in face of new achievements, both in medicine and those coming from the need to explore space? In 2017, NASA published the results of the Human Research Program. The aim was to find out more about the impact of long stays in space on the hu-man body, like manned trips to Mars. The human body will have to face new physical conditions on the Red Planet, such as lower temperatures, a less dense atmosphere, significantly higher radiation and many more. The impact of such conditions is visible and highly variable also in other organisms, including mammals that have the best sense of smell. 3D printing technology is developing continuously and already today we are able to print an ear that can be used for transplants. If this is the case, does it have to look the same? Based on the research regarding the impact of climatic conditions on the shape of noses as well as state of the art regarding such areas as mountaineering, biomimetics, plastic surgery and taking into account mental factors, the article presents original nose designs, aesthetic speculations and interpreting the above visual and formal data

Ishiguro's Inhuman Aesthetics

The question of what it means to be human pervades Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, which gradually reveals a counterfactual twentieth-century England where clone colonies provide ready supplies of organs for donation. In the tradition of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's 1984 (1949), the novel envisions a dystopian civil society where clones struggle to comprehend the significance of their own circumscribed personhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this interrogation of what it means to be human emerges through a critique of Romantic-inspired assumptions about aesthetics and empathy. While the novel attracts attention for its theme of genetic engineering, its deepest anxieties arguably concern the ethics of artistic production and consumption in an age of multiculturalism and globalization. Through its veneer of science fiction, Never Let Me Go offers an allegory both for national concerns about the state of England and for transnational fears about rising global inequality. In its portrait of the systematic exploitation of the clones and its implicit exploration of vulnerable actors in our modern economic order, the novel indicts humanist conceptions of art as a form of extraction that resembles forced organ donation. If Romantic-inspired views of empathy rely on the claim that art reveals the human soul, Ishiguro's novel implies that the concept of the soul invokes a fundamentally exploitative discourse of use value. In this respect, Never Let Me Go shares in a pervasive late-twentieth-century cultural skepticism about the viability of empathetic art. [End Page 785] Yet Ishiguro's critique does not—as might be expected—abandon the ethical potential of works of art. Instead, it makes a case for an ethics offering a very different approach to art and empathy that relies on the recognition of the inhuman. As an alternative to humanist modes of representation, Ishiguro's inhuman style suggests that only by recognizing what in ourselves is mechanical, manufactured, and replicated—in a traditional sense, not fully human—will we escape the barbarities committed in the name of preserving purely human life. Never Let Me Go implies that if there is to be any empathetic connection with Ishiguro's protagonists, it will not occur through the consoling liberal realization that clones are humans, just like us. It will evolve through the darker realization that art, along with the empathy it provokes, needs to escape the traditional concept of the human. The novel thus calls for what seems like a contradiction in terms: an empathetic inhuman aesthetics that embraces the mechanical, commodified, and replicated elements of personhood. While inhuman is often used as a synonym for cruel or unethical, Ishiguro's novel suggests exactly the reverse. As its aesthetics of replication allows us to sympathize with others without recourse to such constraining ideals, Never Let Me Go reinvents empathy for a posthumanist age