Application of electroencephalographic (EEG) biofeedback therapy in the rehabilitation of patients with chronic diseases.

Schizophrenia is one of the chronic mental disorders characterized by disturbances in thought, emotion, language, perception, and behavior. There is no cure for this disease, and most of the current treatments are palliative. In this study, we aimed to analyze the application of electroencephalographic (EEG) biofeedback therapy, an adjunctive treatment used for many psychiatric disorders, in the rehabilitation of schizophrenic patients. Schizophrenic patients were selected as the experimental subjects, and the initial diagnosis criteria were set accordingly. A primary and a secondary efficacy index was then developed for the evaluation of EEG biofeedback therapy rather than traditional drug treatment. Lastly, the effects of the two methods were compared. The findings indicate that traditional drugs could be used in the treatment of mild schizophrenia, but showed poor results for severe and moderate schizophrenia. EEG biofeedback therapy was effective for the treatment of various degrees of schizophrenia and improved patients' sleep quality and anxiety. These findings have significant practical implications for the rehabilitation of schizophrenic patients and patients with chronic diseases in general.

Fast information acquisition using spectra subtraction for Brillouin distributed fiber sensors.

The traditional methods of extracting sensing information of a Brillouin distributed sensor is by curve fitting the Brillouin gain profiles along the fiber, we propose two concise and time-saving methods to process signals from only the frequency shifted section(s) of the fiber by subtracting the original spectrum from the sensing Brillouin spectrum. Experimental results validate that our methods can provide up to over 9 times faster information acquisition for a 10 km sensing fiber with 800 m frequency shifted section comparing with the traditional way. The proposed methods could be potentially attractive in getting information for the Brillouin distributed sensors as well as the Raman and Rayleigh distributed sensors especially when the processing speed is concerned.