Functional Musical Sonification for Chronic Pain Support

Chronic pain causes substantial disability, and people living with chronic pain often use protective behaviours and movements to minimize pain and worry about exacerbating pain during everyday activities such as loading the washing machine. We present work in progress on ubiquitous interactive sonification of body movement to help people with chronic pain to understand and positively modify their movements in clinical and functional situations. The sonification blends informational and aesthetic aspects and is intended for daily use

Bridging the gap between emotion and joint action

Our daily human life is filled with a myriad of joint action moments, be it children playing, adults working together (i.e., team sports), or strangers navigating through a crowd. Joint action brings individuals (and embodiment of their emotions) together, in space and in time. Yet little is known about how individual emotions propagate through embodied presence in a group, and how joint action changes individual emotion. In fact, the multi-agent component is largely missing from neuroscience-based approaches to emotion, and reversely joint action research has not found a way yet to include emotion as one of the key parameters to model socio-motor interaction. In this review, we first identify the gap and then stockpile evidence showing strong entanglement between emotion and acting together from various branches of sciences. We propose an integrative approach to bridge the gap, highlight five research avenues to do so in behavioral neuroscience and digital sciences, and address some of the key challenges in the area faced by modern societies

Social touch gesture recognition using random forest and boosting on distinct feature sets

Touch is a primary nonverbal communication channel used to communicate emotions or other social messages. Despite its importance, this channel is still very little explored in the affective computing field, as much more focus has been placed on visual and aural channels. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to automatically discriminate between different social touch types. We propose five distinct feature sets for describing touch behaviours captured by a grid of pressure sensors. These features are then combined together by using the Random Forest and Boosting methods for categorizing the touch gesture type. The proposed methods were evaluated on both the HAART (7 gesture types over different surfaces) and the CoST (14 gesture types over the same surface) datasets made available by the Social Touch Gesture Challenge 2015. Well above chance level performances were achieved with a 67% accuracy for the HAART and 59% for the CoST testing datasets respectively

How Can Affect Be Detected and Represented in Technological Support for Physical Rehabilitation?

Although clinical best practice suggests that affect awareness could enable more effective technological support for physical rehabilitation through personalisation to psychological needs, designers need to consider what affective states matter and how they should be tracked and addressed. In this paper, we set the standard by analysing how the major affective factors in chronic pain (pain, fear/anxiety, and low/depressed mood) interfere with everyday physical functioning. Further, based on discussion of the modality that should be used to track these states to enable technology to address them, we investigated the possibility of using movement behaviour to automatically detect the states. Using two body movement datasets on people with chronic pain, we show that movement behaviour enables very good discrimination between two emotional distress levels (F1=0.86), and three pain levels (F1=0.9). Performance remained high (F1=0.78 for two pain levels) with a reduced set of movement sensors. Finally, in an overall discussion, we suggest how technology-provided encouragement and awareness can be personalised given the capability to automatically monitor the relevant states, towards addressing the barriers that they pose. In addition, we highlight movement behaviour features to be tracked to provide technology with information necessary for such personalisation

Impact of perioperative chemotherapy on survival in patients with advanced primary urethral cancer: results of the international collaboration on primary urethral carcinoma

This is the first series that suggests a prognostic benefit of neoadjuvant treatment in a consecutive series of patients who underwent perioperative chemotherapy plus surgery for advanced primary urethral carcinoma. Further studies should yield a better understanding of how perioperative chemotherapy exerts a positive effect on survival in order to selectively advocate its use in advanced primary urethral carcinom

Counseling patients about sexual health when considering post-prostatectomy radiation treatment

Prostate cancer is the second most frequently diagnosed cancer in men in the United States. Many men with clinically localized prostate cancer survive for 15 years or more. Although early detection and successful definitive treatments are increasingly common, a debate regarding how aggressively to treat prostate cancer is ongoing because of the effect of aggressive treatment on the quality of life, including sexual functioning. We examined current research on the effect of post-prostatectomy radiation treatment on sexual functioning, and suggest a way in which patient desired outcomes might be taken into consideration while making decisions with regard to the timing of radiation therapy after prostatectomy