Tactile emoticons: Conveying social emotions and intentions with manual and robotic tactile feedback during social media communications.

Touch offers important non-verbal possibilities for socioaffective communication. Yet most digital communications lack capabilities regarding exchanging affective tactile messages (tactile emoticons). Additionally, previous studies on tactile emoticons have not capitalised on knowledge about the affective effects of certain mechanoreceptors in the human skin, e.

Sensing behavior change in chronic pain: a scoping review of sensor technology for use in daily life.

Technology offers possibilities for quantification of behaviors and physiological changes of relevance to chronic pain, using wearable sensors and devices suitable for data collection in daily life contexts. We conducted a scoping review of wearable and passive sensor technologies that sample data of psychological interest in chronic pain, including in social situations. Sixty articles met our criteria from the 2783 citations retrieved from searching.

Guarding and flow in the movements of people with chronic pain: A qualitative study of physiotherapists' observations.

Background: Among the adaptations of movement consistently associated with disability in chronic pain, guarding is common. Based on previous work, we sought to understand better the constituents of guarding; we also used the concept of flow to explore the description of un/naturalness that emerged from physiotherapists' descriptions of movement in chronic pain. The aim was to inform the design of technical systems to support people with chronic pain in everyday activities.

Effect of the level of task abstraction on the transfer of knowledge from virtual environments in cognitive and motor tasks.

Introduction: Virtual environments are increasingly being used for training. It is not fully understood what elements of virtual environments have the most impact and how the virtual training is integrated by the brain on the sought-after skill transference to the real environment. In virtual training, we analyzed how the task level of abstraction modulates the brain activity and the subsequent ability to execute it in the real environment and how this learning generalizes to other tasks.

Exploring multisensory integration of non-naturalistic sounds on body perception in young females with eating disorders symptomatology: a study protocol.

Background: Bodily illusions can be used to investigate the experience of being in a body by manipulating the underlying processes of multisensory integration. Research suggests that people with eating disorders (EDs) may have impairments in visual, interoceptive, proprioceptive, and tactile bodily perception. Furthermore, people with EDs also show abnormalities in integrating multisensory visuo-tactile and visual-auditory signals related to the body, which may contribute to the development of body image disturbances.

Body weight distortions in an auditory-driven body illusion in subclinical and clinical eating disorders.

Previous studies suggest a stronger influence of visual signals on body image in individuals with eating disorders (EDs) than healthy controls; however, the influence of other exteroceptive sensory signals remains unclear. Here we used an illusion relying on auditory (exteroceptive) signals to manipulate body size/weight perceptions and investigated whether the mechanisms integrating sensory signals into body image are altered in subclinical and clinical EDs. Participants' footstep sounds were altered to seem produced by lighter or heavier bodies.

Investigating psychological variables for technologies promoting physical activity.

Background: Many technological interventions designed to promote physical activity (PA) have limited efficacy and appear to lack important factors that could increase engagement. This may be due to a discrepancy between research conducted in this space, and software designers' and developers' use of this research to inform new digital applications.

Objectives: This study aimed to identify (1) what are the variables that act as barriers and facilitators to PA and (2) which PA variables are currently considered in the design of technologies promoting PA including psychological, physical, and personal/contextual ones which are critical in promoting PA.

Effects of pitch and musical sounds on body-representations when moving with sound.

The effects of music on bodily movement and feelings, such as when people are dancing or engaged in physical activity, are well-documented-people may move in response to the sound cues, feel powerful, less tired. How sounds and bodily movements relate to create such effects? Here we deconstruct the problem and investigate how different auditory features affect people's body-representation and feelings even when paired with the same movement. In three experiments, participants executed a simple arm raise synchronised with changing pitch in simple tones (Experiment 1), rich musical sounds (Experiment 2) and within different frequency ranges (Experiment 3), while we recorded indirect and direct measures on their movement, body-representations and feelings.

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.

Action Sounds Informing Own Body Perception Influence Gender Identity and Social Cognition.

Sensory information can temporarily affect mental body representations. For example, in Virtual Reality (VR), visually swapping into a body with another sex can temporarily alter perceived gender identity. Outside of VR, real-time auditory changes to walkers' footstep sounds can affect perceived body weight and masculinity/femininity.

The relationship between guarding, pain, and emotion.

Introduction: Pain-related behavior in people with chronic pain is often overlooked in a focus on increasing the amount of activity, yet it may limit activity and maintain pain and disability. Targeting it in treatment requires better understanding of the role of beliefs, emotion, and pain in pain behavior.

Objectives: This study aimed to clarify the interrelationships between guarding, pain, anxiety, and confidence in movement in people with chronic pain in everyday movements.

Instant Stress: Detection of Perceived Mental Stress Through Smartphone Photoplethysmography and Thermal Imaging.

Background: A smartphone is a promising tool for daily cardiovascular measurement and mental stress monitoring. A smartphone camera-based photoplethysmography (PPG) and a low-cost thermal camera can be used to create cheap, convenient, and mobile monitoring systems. However, to ensure reliable monitoring results, a person must remain still for several minutes while a measurement is being taken.

The application of psychologically informed practice: observations of experienced physiotherapists working with people with chronic pain.

Objectives: Psychologically informed practice (PIP) is advocated for physiotherapists to help people with chronic pain. There is little research observing how PIP is delivered in clinical practice. This study describes behaviours and techniques used by experienced physiotherapists working with groups of people with chronic pain.

Assumptions about the positioning of virtual stimuli affect gaze direction estimates during Augmented Reality based interactions.

We investigated gaze direction determination in dyadic interactions mediated by an Augmented Reality (AR) head-mounted-display. With AR, virtual content is overlaid on top of the real-world scene, offering unique data visualization and interaction opportunities. A drawback of AR however is related to uncertainty regarding the AR user's focus of attention in social-collaborative settings: an AR user looking in our direction might either be paying attention to us or to augmentations positioned somewhere in between.

Use of a Low-Cost, Chest-Mounted Accelerometer to Evaluate Transfer Skills of Wheelchair Users During Everyday Activities: Observational Study.

Background: Transfers are an important skill for many wheelchair users (WU). However, they have also been related to the risk of falling or developing upper limb injuries. Transfer abilities are usually evaluated in clinical settings or biomechanics laboratories, and these methods of assessment are poorly suited to evaluation in real and unconstrained world settings where transfers take place.

Audio-tactile cues from an object's fall change estimates of one's body height.

When we drop an object from our hands, we use internal models of both our body height and object-motion to predict when it will hit the floor. What happens if the sensory feedback finally received from the impact conflicts with this prediction? The present study shows that such conflict results in changes in the internal estimates of our body height: When the object people dropped takes longer than expected to hit the floor, they report feeling taller and behave as if their legs were longer. This provides the first evidence of cross-modal recalibration of body-height representations as a function of changes in the distant environment.

Author Correction: Contingent sounds change the mental representation of one's finger length.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Author Correction: Embodiment in a Child-Like Talking Virtual Body Influences Object Size Perception, Self-Identification, and Subsequent Real Speaking.

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Robust tracking of respiratory rate in high-dynamic range scenes using mobile thermal imaging.

The ability to monitor the respiratory rate, one of the vital signs, is extremely important for the medical treatment, healthcare and fitness sectors. In many situations, mobile methods, which allow users to undertake everyday activities, are required. However, current monitoring systems can be obtrusive, requiring users to wear respiration belts or nasal probes.

Embodiment in a Child-Like Talking Virtual Body Influences Object Size Perception, Self-Identification, and Subsequent Real Speaking.

People's mental representations of their own body are malleable and continuously updated through sensory cues. Altering one's body-representation can lead to changes in object perception and implicit attitudes. Virtual reality has been used to embody adults in the body of a 4-year-old child or a scaled-down adult body.

Bodily Sensory Inputs and Anomalous Bodily Experiences in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome: Evaluation of the Potential Effects of Sound Feedback.

Neuroscientific studies have shown that human's mental body representations are not fixed but are constantly updated through sensory feedback, including sound feedback. This suggests potential new therapeutic sensory approaches for patients experiencing body-perception disturbances (BPD). BPD can occur in association with chronic pain, for example in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS).

Contingent sounds change the mental representation of one's finger length.

Mental body-representations are highly plastic and can be modified after brief exposure to unexpected sensory feedback. While the role of vision, touch and proprioception in shaping body-representations has been highlighted by many studies, the auditory influences on mental body-representations remain poorly understood. Changes in body-representations by the manipulation of natural sounds produced when one's body impacts on surfaces have recently been evidenced.

Action Sounds Modulate Arm Reaching Movements.

Our mental representations of our body are continuously updated through multisensory bodily feedback as we move and interact with our environment. Although it is often assumed that these internal models of body-representation are used to successfully act upon the environment, only a few studies have actually looked at how body-representation changes influence goal-directed actions, and none have looked at this in relation to body-representation changes induced by sound. The present work examines this question for the first time.