Publications by authors named "Luz Maria Alonso-Valerdi"

Understanding the somatosensory system and its abnormalities requires the development of devices that can accurately stimulate the human skin. New methods for assessing the somatosensory system can enhance the diagnosis, treatments, and prognosis for individuals with somatosensory impairments. Therefore, the design of NeuroSense, a tactile stimulator that evokes three types of daily life sensations (touch, air and vibration) is described in this work.

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Introduction: Assistive technologies for learning are aimed at promoting academic skills, such as reading and mathematics. These technologies mainly embrace mobile and web apps addressed to children with learning difficulties. Nevertheless, most applications lack pedagogical foundation.

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Background: Socio-emotional impairments are among the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the actual knowledge has substantiated both altered and intact emotional prosodies recognition. Here, a Bayesian framework of perception is considered suggesting that the oversampling of sensory evidence would impair perception within highly variable environments. However, reliable hierarchical structures for spectral and temporal cues would foster emotion discrimination by autistics.

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The present database contains brain activity of subjective tinnitus sufferers at identifying their sound tinnitus. The main objective of this database is to provide spontaneous Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity at rest, and evoked EEG activity when tinnitus sufferers attempt to identify their sound tinnitus among 54 tinnitus sound examples. For the database, 37 volunteers were recruited: 15 ones without tinnitus (Control Group - CG), and 22 ones with tinnitus (Tinnitus Group - TG).

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Acoustic characterizations of different locations are necessary to obtain relevant information on their behavior, particularly in the case of places that have not been fully understood or which purpose is still unknown since they are from cultures that no longer exist. Acoustic measurements were conducted in the archaeological zone of Edzna to obtain useful information to better understand the customs and practices of its past inhabitants. The information obtained from these acoustic measurements is presented in a dataset, which includes measurements taken at 32 points around the entire archaeological zone, with special attention given to the Main Plaza, the Great Acropolis, and the Little Acropolis.

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The impact of binaural beats (BBs) on human cognition and behavior remains and various methods have been used to measure their effect, including neurophysiological, psychometric, and human performance evaluations. The few approaches where the level of neural synchronicity and connectivity were measured by neuroimaging techniques have only been undertaken in spontaneous mode. The present research proposes an approach based on the oddball paradigm to study BB effect by estimating the level of attention induced by BBs.

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Emotional content is particularly salient, but situational factors such as cognitive load may disturb the attentional prioritization towards affective stimuli and interfere with their processing. In this study, 31 autistic and 31 typically developed children volunteered to assess their perception of affective prosodies via event-related spectral perturbations of neuronal oscillations recorded by electroencephalography under attentional load modulations induced by Multiple Object Tracking or neutral images. Although intermediate load optimized emotion processing by typically developed children, load and emotion did not interplay in children with autism.

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Thirty-six chronic neuropathic pain patients (8 men and 28 women) of Mexican nationality with a mean age of 44±13.98 were recruited for EEG signal recording in eyes open and eyes closed resting state condition. Each condition was recorded for 5 min, with a total recording session time of 10 min.

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The relevance of affective information triggers cognitive prioritisation, dictated by both the attentional load of the relevant task, and socio-emotional abilities. This dataset provides electroencephalographic (EEG) signals related to implicit emotional speech perception under low, intermediate, and high attentional demands. Demographic and behavioural data are also provided.

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Background And Objective: Chronic neuropathic pain (NP) is a chronic pain condition that severely impacts a patient's life. Pain management has proved to be inefficient due to a lack of a simple clinical tool that may identify and monitor NP. A low-cost, noninvasive tool that provides relevant information on NP is the electroencephalogram (EEG).

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Artificial voices are nowadays embedded into our daily lives with latest neural voices approaching human voice consistency (naturalness). Nevertheless, behavioral, and neuronal correlates of the perception of less naturalistic emotional prosodies are still misunderstood. In this study, we explored the acoustic tendencies that define naturalness from human to synthesized voices.

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The present database provides demographic (age and sex), clinical (hearing loss and acoustic properties of tinnitus), psychometric (based on Tinnitus Handicapped Inventory and Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale) and electroencephalographic information of 89 tinnitus sufferers who were semi-randomly treated for eight weeks with one of five acoustic therapies. These were (1) placebo (relaxing music), (2) tinnitus retraining therapy, (3) auditory discrimination therapy, (4) enriched acoustic environment, and (5) binaural beats therapy. Fourteen healthy volunteers who were exposed to relaxing music and followed the same experimental procedure as tinnitus sufferers were additionally included in the study (control group).

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The management of chronic neuropathic pain remains a challenge, because pain is subjective, and measuring it objectively is usually out of question. However, neuropathic pain is also a signal provided by maladaptive neuronal activity. Thus, the integral management of chronic neuropathic pain should not only rely on the subjective perception of the patient, but also on objective data that measures the evolution of neuronal activity.

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Tinnitus is an auditory condition that causes humans to hear a sound anytime, anywhere. Chronic and refractory tinnitus is caused by an over synchronization of neurons. Sound has been applied as an alternative treatment to resynchronize neuronal activity.

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The lack of an integral characterization of chronic neuropathic pain (NP) has led to pharmacotherapy mismanagement and has hindered advances in clinical trials. In this study, we attempted to identify chronic NP by fusing psychometric (based on the Brief Inventory of Pain - BIP), and both linear and non-linear electroencephalographic (EEG) features. For this purpose, 35 chronic NP patients were recruited voluntarily.

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Binaural beats (BB) consist of two slightly distinct auditory frequencies (one in each ear), which are differentiated with clinical electroencephalographic (EEG) bandwidths, namely, delta, theta, alpha, beta, or gamma. This auditory stimulation has been widely used to module brain rhythms and thus inducing the mental condition associated with the EEG bandwidth in use. The aim of this research was to investigate whether personalized BB (specifically those within theta and beta EEG bands) improve brain entrainment.

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Introduction: Tinnitus is an annoying buzz that manifests itself in many ways. In addition, it can provoke anxiety, stress, depression, and fatigue. The acoustic therapies have become the most commonly applied treatment for tinnitus, either self-administered or clinically prescribed.

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Environmental noise (EN) refers to unpleasant harmful sounds that deteriorates living conditions. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how EN affects students at learning commons, where EN increases between 70 and 90 dBA, and which levels disturb psycho-physiologically. For this purpose, 16 students of Tecnologico de Monterrey were recruited: nine men and seven women.

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At present, the majority of the top tinnitus treatments is based on sound. Sound-based therapies may become highly effective when the right patient at the correct time and the appropriate context is selected. The investigation presented here attempts to compare sound therapies based on music, retraining, neuromodulation, and binaural sounds in line with (1) neuro-audiology assessments and (2) psychological evaluations.

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Socio-emotional impairments are key symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders. This work proposes to analyze the neuronal activity related to the discrimination of emotional prosodies in autistic children (aged 9 to 11-year-old) as follows. Firstly, a database for single words uttered in Mexican Spanish by males, females, and children will be created.

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Tridimensional representations stimulate cognitive processes that are the core and foundation of human-computer interaction (HCI). Those cognitive processes take place while a user navigates and explores a virtual environment (VE) and are mainly related to spatial memory storage, attention, and perception. VEs have many distinctive features (e.

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Background: To date, a large number of acoustic therapies have been applied to treat tinnitus. The effect that produces those auditory stimuli is, however, not well understood yet. Furthermore, the conventional clinical protocol is based on a trial-error procedure, and there is not a formal and adequate treatment follow-up.

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A brain-computer interface (BCI) aims to establish communication between the human brain and a computing system so as to enable the interaction between an individual and his environment without using the brain output pathways. Individuals control a BCI system by modulating their brain signals through mental tasks (e.g.

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