The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : High-Tech to Conquer High Anxiety
Everybody’s favorite new technology, virtual reality, now has yet another potential application: treating behavioral disorders.
A team of computer scientists and clinical psychologists at Georgia Tech has used virtual reality to help people with acrophobia reduce their fear of heights. While traditional exposure treatment for acrophobia requires the therapist and patient to leave the office and work in real height situations, virtual reality enabled therapists to provide the same exposure in an office situation.
In a recent study, a group of college students who showed clear clinical signs of acrophobia were outfitted with head-mounted VR displays to view a series of anxiety-producing scenes such as bridges, balconies and an open glass hotel atrium elevator. The subjects began at ground level and moved gradually higher in the simulated scenes until they became distressed. They then remained at that level until their anxiety decreased.
Ultimately, all the students mastered the virtual environments, including what became known as the “Indiana Jones” bridge suspended a simulated about 260 feet above a river. The research may open new possibilities for dealing with a broad range of phobic conditions whose treatment now relies on exposure to real anxiety-producing situations. Virtual snakes, anyone?
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Coming Soon, Ex-Terminator: Man likes to think he is the measure of all things. But it may turn out that his nemesis, the cockroach, will be a better model for robots than any human cyborg. That’s because of the cockroach’s more variable locomotion and decentralized neural patterns.
A team of scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has built a 22-inch aluminum model cockroach to test their theories. Unlike previous robot walking machines, a cockroach can go over terrain well above its height. It doesn’t slow down and stays in normal posture even when switching from regular to irregular terrain.
The insect apparently can do this because rather than having its locomotion controlled by a centralized source, separate neural centers control each leg. To simulate this in the four-foot-tall cockroach that the scientists expect to have built by summer, a six-node control system will receive positioning signals from leg sensors and then send signals to move the leg. One pneumatic cylinder operates each joint, with two valves per cylinder to maintain or change the desired pressure.
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Shrink Software: Depressed? Stressed out? Instead of reclining on a therapist’s couch, you may want to turn to a computer software program called Therapeutic Learning Program. That, at least, is the conclusion of a UCLA study that was discussed recently at the Western Psychological Assn. convention.
The study involved 90 patients who were randomly divided into two groups. One group saw a psychotherapist for about 50 minutes a week for 10 weeks. In the other group, each patient used the TLP software program for 10 “sessions” supplemented by brief 10- to 15-minute weekly visits with a therapist.
Both groups reported that they were satisfied with the treatment they received. The software program helps patients see patterns in their behavior through a series of questions. In the first of the 10 sessions, for example, the TLP software asks patients to identify sources of stress from a list of choices that includes work, family life, social life, emotional life and physical health. If a patient chooses work, he will be asked to identify more specific courses of stress from a menu of choices--his boss, a co-worker, fear of losing his job. The software also asks whether the stress causes feelings of anger, frustration, insecurity and so on.
But therapists shouldn’t rush out to dispose of their couches just yet. While patients found the software-based treatment as effective as more traditional treatment, they generally preferred the more intensive interaction with a therapist.
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Turning Info Into Intelligence: Software developed for the U.S. intelligence community could one day prove useful to lawyers, doctors, regulators or anyone who has to analyze large amounts of information.
Developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory, two software tools--called Galaxies and Themescapes--graphically display images based on word similarities. By applying these visualization tools to large sets of documents, information analysts were able to see pictures of the similarities and themes in the content of the documents without having to read unnecessary text.
Galaxies computes the word similarities and patterns and then displays the documents on the computer screen to look like a universe of “docustars.” Closely related documents cluster together in a tight group while unrelated documents are separated by large spaces. In Themescape, themes in documents are layered and appear on the screen as a relief map of natural terrain. A mountain would indicate where themes are concentrated in the underlying documents, for example, and its shape--a broad butte or a high pinnacle--would reflect how the information is distributed and related across documents. Users can further refine their searches through queries and other research techniques.
