Prevalence and correlates of psychiatric morbidity among caregivers of children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders in Nigeria

Objective: To screen for psychiatric morbidity among caregivers of patients attending a child and adolescent psychiatric clinic. Method: A total of 155 patients and their caregivers were consecutively recruited over a 1 month period. Sociodemographic and clinical information on patients was obtained either from the hospital records or from the caregiver. Scoring on the Children’s Global Assessment Scale (CGAS) was done by clinicians. The caregivers were administered a sociodemographic questionnaire, GHQ-12, Zarit Burden interview, and the Columbia Impairment Scale. Results: Most caregivers observed in this study were females (80.5%) with mothers of the patients accounting for 78% of all the caregivers. A higher percentage of the patients were males (52.8%). Among the caregivers, 39.4% had GHQ Scores of 3 and above. Factors associated with psychiatric morbidity among caregivers include the high level of subjective burden of care, low level of functioning, high degree of impairment and low level of education among patients. Conclusion: The study reveals a high level of psychiatric morbidity among the carers of children and adolescents with mental health problems.Keywords: Psychiatric morbidity; Care giver; Children and adolescent

From presence to consciousness through virtual reality

Immersive virtual environments can break the deep, everyday connection between where our senses tell us we are and where we are actually located and whom we are with. The concept of 'presence' refers to the phenomenon of behaving and feeling as if we are in the virtual world created by computer displays. In this article, we argue that presence is worthy of study by neuroscientists, and that it might aid the study of perception and consciousness

Prescription pattern at psychiatric hospital, Yaba, Lagos

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The COVEN project: exploring applicative, technical, and usage dimensions of collaborative virtual environments

COVEN (Collaborative Virtual Environments) is a European project that seeks to develop a comprehensive approach to the issues in the development of collaborative virtual environment (CVE) technology. COVEN brings together twelve academic and industrial partners with a wide range of expertise in CSCW, networked VR, computer graphics, human factors, HCI, and telecommunications infrastructures. After two years of work, we are presenting the main features of our approach and results, our driving applications, the main components of our technical investigations, and our experimental activities. With different citizen and professional application scenarios as driving forces, COVEN is exploring the requirements and supporting techniques for collaborative interaction in scalable CVEs. Technical results are being integrated in an enriched networked VR platform based on the dVS and DIVE systems. Taking advantage of a dedicated Europe-wide ISDN and ATM network infrastructure, a large component of the project is a trial and experimentation activity that should allow a comprehensive understanding of the network requirements of these systems as well as their usability issues and human factors aspect

Am I better in VR with a real audience?

International audienceWe present an experimental study using virtual reality (VR) to investigate the effects of a real audience on social inhibition. The study compares a multiuser application, locally or remotely shared. The application engages one user and a real audience (i.e., local or remote conditions) and a control condition where the user is alone (i.e., alone condition). The differences have been explored by analyzing the objective performance (i.e., type and answering time) of users when performing a categorization of numbers task in VR. Moreover, the subjective feelings and perceptions (i.e., perceptions of others, stress, cognitive workload, presence) of each user have been compared in relation to the location of the real audience. The results showed that in the presence of a real audience (in the local and remote conditions), user performance is affected by social inhibitions. Furthermore, users are even more influenced when the audience does not share the same room, despite others are less perceived

The human role in telerobotics

This chapter introduces the main topics of a telerobotic system. It describes the architecture of such a system from a general point of view and emphasizes the interaction between a human operator and a robot that performs the task in the remote environment. Furthermore it focuses on multi-modal human system interfaces and explains the main features of haptic, auditory, and visual interfaces. Finally important issues for the measurement and evaluation of the attribute telepresence are described. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg