Immersive virtual reality in improving communication skills in children with Autism

Individuals in the Autism Spectrum often encounter situations where they have to respond to questions and situations that they do not know how to respond to, such as, questions asked by strangers including ones related to daily-life activities. A variety of research has been done to improve social and communication impairments in children with autism using technology. Immersive virtual reality is a relatively recent technology with a potential to bring an effective solution and used as a therapeutic tool to develop different skills. This paper presents a virtual reality solution to reduce the gap experienced by autistic children due to their inability to establish a communication. An interactive scenario-based system that uses role-play and turn-taking technique was implemented to evaluate and verify the effectiveness of immersive environment on the social performance of an autistic child. Preliminary testing of the system demonstrated the feasibility of VR-based system as a tool for improving the communication skill in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) children. The results of the comparative usability study show the effectiveness of immersive VR in motivating and satisfying the autistic.Scopu

Infra-slow EEG fluctuations are correlated with resting-state network dynamics in fMRI

Ongoing neuronal activity in the CNS waxes and wanes continuously across widespread spatial and temporal scales. In the human brain, these spontaneous fluctuations are salient in blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals and correlated within specific brain systems or “intrinsic-connectivity networks.” In electrophysiological recordings, both the amplitude dynamics of fast (1–100 Hz) oscillations and the scalp potentials per se exhibit fluctuations in the same infra-slow (0.01–0.1 Hz) frequency range where the BOLD fluctuations are conspicuous. While several lines of evidence show that the BOLD fluctuations are correlated with fast-amplitude dynamics, it has remained unclear whether the infra-slow scalp potential fluctuations in full-band electroencephalography (fbEEG) are related to the resting-state BOLD signals. We used concurrent fbEEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings to address the relationship of infra-slow fluctuations (ISFs) in scalp potentials and BOLD signals. We show here that independent components of fbEEG recordings are selectively correlated with subsets of cortical BOLD signals in specific task-positive and task-negative, fMRI-defined resting-state networks. This brain system-specific association indicates that infra-slow scalp potentials are directly associated with the endogenous fluctuations in neuronal activity levels. fbEEG thus yields a noninvasive, high-temporal resolution window into the dynamics of intrinsic connectivity networks. These results support the view that the slow potentials reflect changes in cortical excitability and shed light on neuronal substrates underlying both electrophysiological and behavioral ISFs