Brief Report: Quantifying Speech Production Coordination from Non- and Minimally-Speaking Individuals.

PURPOSE: Non-verbal utterances are an important tool of communication for individuals who are non- or minimally-speaking. While these utterances are typically understood by caregivers, they can be challenging to interpret by their larger community. To date, there has been little work done to detect and characterize the vocalizations produced by non- or minimally-speaking individuals. This paper aims to characterize five categories of utterances across a set of 7 non- or minimally-speaking individuals. METHODS: The characterization is accomplished using a correlation structure methodology, acting as a proxy measurement for motor coordination, to localize similarities and differences to specific speech production systems. RESULTS: We specifically find that frustrated and dysregulated utterances show similar correlation structure outputs, especially when compared to self-talk, request, and delighted utterances. We additionally witness higher complexity of coordination between articulatory and respiratory subsystems and lower complexity of coordination between laryngeal and respiratory subsystems in frustration and dysregulation as compared to self-talk, request, and delight. Finally, we observe lower complexity of coordination across all three speech subsystems in the request utterances as compared to self-talk and delight. CONCLUSION: The insights from this work aid in understanding of the modifications made by non- or minimally-speaking individuals to accomplish specific goals in non-verbal communication.

Aesthetic chills mitigate maladaptive cognition in depression.

BACKGROUND: Depression is a major global health challenge, affecting over 300 million people worldwide. Current pharmacological and psychotherapeutic interventions have limited efficacy, underscoring the need for novel approaches. Emerging evidence suggests that peak emotional experiences characterized by awe, transcendence, and meaning hold promise for rapidly shifting maladaptive cognitive patterns in depression. Aesthetic chills, a peak positive emotion characterized by physical sensations such as shivers and goosebumps, may influence reward-related neural pathways and hold promise for modifying core maladaptive beliefs rooted in early adverse experiences. METHODS: We enrolled 96 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder. A validated database of multimedia known to elicit chills responses (ChillsDB) was used for stimulus presentation. Participants' emotional responses were assessed using the Emotional Breakthrough Inventory (EBI), while shifts in self-schema were measured via the Young Positive Schema Questionnaire (YSPQ). RESULTS: The study found that chill-inducing stimuli have the potential to positively influence the core schema of individuals with depression, impacting areas of self-related beliefs. The associated phenomenology triggered by chills appears to share similarities with the altered states of consciousness induced by psychedelic substances like psilocybin. CONCLUSIONS: These preliminary results suggest that the biological processes involved in aesthetic chills could be harnessed as a non-pharmacological intervention for depression. However, further investigation is necessary to comprehensively understand the neurophysiological responses to chills and to evaluate the practicality, effectiveness, and safety of utilizing aesthetic chills as a preventive measure in mental health care.

Interoceptive technologies for psychiatric interventions: From diagnosis to clinical applications.

Interoception-the perception of internal bodily signals-has emerged as an area of interest due to its implications in emotion and the prevalence of dysfunctional interoceptive processes across psychopathological conditions. Despite the importance of interoception in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, its experimental manipulation remains technically challenging. This is due to the invasive nature of existing methods, the limitation of self-report and unimodal measures of interoception, and the absence of standardized approaches across disparate fields. This article integrates diverse research efforts from psychology, physiology, psychiatry, and engineering to address this oversight. Following a general introduction to the neurophysiology of interoception as hierarchical predictive processing, we review the existing paradigms for manipulating interoception (e.g., interoceptive modulation), their underlying mechanisms (e.g., interoceptive conditioning), and clinical applications (e.g., interoceptive exposure). We suggest a classification for interoceptive technologies and discuss their potential for diagnosing and treating mental health disorders. Despite promising results, considerable work is still needed to develop standardized, validated measures of interoceptive function across domains and before these technologies can translate safely and effectively to clinical settings.

Fascia Ecosystem: A Step Forward in Sleep Engineering and Research.

Millions suffer from sleep disorders, and sleep clinics and research institutions seek improved sleep study methods. This paper proposes the Fascia Ecosystem for Sleep Engineering to improve traditional sleep studies. The Fascia Sleep Mask is more comfortable and accessible than overnight stays at a sleep center, and the Fascia Portal and Fascia Hub allow for home-based sleep studies with real-time intervention and data analysis capabilities.A study of 10 sleep experts found that the Fascia Portal is easy to access, navigate, and use, with 44.4% finding it very easy to access, 33.3% very easy to navigate, and 60% very easy to get used to. Most experts found the Fascia Portal reliable and easy to use.Moreover, the study analyzed physiological signals during various states of sleep and wakefulness in two subjects. The results demonstrated that the Fascia dataset captured higher amplitude spindles in N2 sleep (72.20 V and 109.87 V in frontal and parietal regions, respectively) and higher peak-to-peak amplitude slow waves in N3 sleep (93.51 V) compared to benchmark datasets. Fascia produced stronger and more consistent EOG signals during REM sleep, indicating its potential to improve sleep disorder diagnosis and treatment by providing a deeper understanding of sleep patterns.

ReCANVo: A database of real-world communicative and affective nonverbal vocalizations.

Nonverbal vocalizations, such as sighs, grunts, and yells, are informative expressions within typical verbal speech. Likewise, individuals who produce 0-10 spoken words or word approximations ("minimally speaking" individuals) convey rich affective and communicative information through nonverbal vocalizations even without verbal speech. Yet, despite their rich content, little to no data exists on the vocal expressions of this population. Here, we present ReCANVo: Real-World Communicative and Affective Nonverbal Vocalizations - a novel dataset of non-speech vocalizations labeled by function from minimally speaking individuals. The ReCANVo database contains over 7000 vocalizations spanning communicative and affective functions from eight minimally speaking individuals, along with communication profiles for each participant. Vocalizations were recorded in real-world settings and labeled in real-time by a close family member who knew the communicator well and had access to contextual information while labeling. ReCANVo is a novel database of nonverbal vocalizations from minimally speaking individuals, the largest available dataset of nonverbal vocalizations, and one of the only affective speech datasets collected amidst daily life across contexts.

Targeted dream incubation at sleep onset increases post-sleep creative performance.

The link between dreams and creativity has been a topic of intense speculation. Recent scientific findings suggest that sleep onset (known as N1) may be an ideal brain state for creative ideation. However, the specific link between N1 dream content and creativity has remained unclear. To investigate the contribution of N1 dream content to creative performance, we administered targeted dream incubation (a protocol that presents auditory cues at sleep onset to introduce specific themes into dreams) and collected dream reports to measure incorporation of the selected theme into dream content. We then assessed creative performance using a set of three theme-related creativity tasks. Our findings show enhanced creative performance and greater semantic distance in task responses following a period of N1 sleep as compared to wake, corroborating recent work identifying N1 as a creative sweet spot and offering novel evidence for N1 enabling a cognitive state with greater associative divergence. We further demonstrate that successful N1 dream incubation enhances creative performance more than N1 sleep alone. To our knowledge, this is the first controlled experiment investigating a direct role of incubating dream content in the enhancement of creative performance.

ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli.

We introduce ChillsDB the first validated database of audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population. To discover chills stimuli "in the wild", we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion' somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms (YouTube and Reddit). We successfully captured 204 chills-eliciting videos of three categories: music, film, and speech. We then tested the top 50 videos in the database on 600+ participants and validated a gold standard of 10 stimuli with a 0.9 probability of generating chills. All ChillsDB tools and data are fully available on GitHub for researchers to be able to contribute and perform further analysis.

Situated VR: Toward a Congruent Hybrid Reality Without Experiential Artifacts.

The vision of extended reality (XR) systems is living in a world where real and virtual elements seamlessly and contextually augment experiences of ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. While this integration promises exciting opportunities for the future of XR, it comes with the risk of experiential distortions and feelings of dissociation, especially related to virtual reality (VR). When transitioning from a virtual world to the real world, users report of experiential structures that linger on, as sort of after images, causing disruptions in their daily life. In this work, we define these atypical experiences as experiential artifacts (EAs) and present preliminary results from an informal survey conducted online with 76 VR users to highlight different types of artifacts and their durations. To avoid disruptions caused by these artifacts and simultaneously increase the user's sense of presence, we propose the idea of situated VR, which blends the real and virtual in novel ways that can reduce incongruencies between the two worlds. We discuss the implications of EAs, and through examples from our own work in building hybrid experiences, we demonstrate the potential and relevance of situated VR in the design of a future, more immersive, artifact-free hybrid reality.

Development and Study of Ezzence: A Modular Scent Wearable to Improve Wellbeing in Home Sleep Environments.

Ezzence is the first smartphone-controlled olfactometer designed for both day and night conditions. We discuss the design and technical implementation of Ezzence and report on a study to evaluate the feasibility of using the device in home-based sleep environments. The study results (N = 40) show that participants were satisfied with the device and found it easy to use. Furthermore, participants reported a significant improvement in sleep quality when using the device with scent in comparison to the control condition (p = 0.003), as well as better mood the following morning (p = 0.038) and shorter time to sleep onset (p = 0.008). The device is integrated with a wearable EEG and real-time sleep staging algorithm to release scent during specific sleep stages (N1, N2, N3, and REM), which is important for certain use cases (e.g., to study the effect of scent on REM dreams, or to improve memory consolidation with a re-exposure of scent during N2 and N3). Ezzence can be used for several applications, including those that require scent triggered day and night. They include targeted memory reactivation, longitudinal health treatments, therapy, and mental or physical exercises. Finally, this article proposes an interaction framework to understand relationships between scents and environments based on proxemic dimensions and passive or active interactions during sleep.

Aesthetic chills cause an emotional drift in valence and arousal.

Aesthetic chills are an embodied peak emotional experience induced by stimuli such as music, films, and speeches and characterized by dopaminergic release. The emotional consequences of chills in terms of valence and arousal are still debated and the existing empirical data is conflicting. In this study, we tested the effects of ChillsDB, an open-source repository of chills-inducing stimuli, on the emotional ratings of 600+ participants. We found that participants experiencing chills reported significantly more positive valence and greater arousal during the experience, compared to participants who did not experience chills. This suggests that the embodied experience of chills may influence one's perception and affective evaluation of the context, in favor of theoretical models emphasizing the role of interoceptive signals such as chills in the process of perception and decision-making. We also found an interesting pattern in the valence ratings of participants, which tended to harmonize toward a similar mean after the experiment, though initially disparately distributed. We discuss the significance of these results for the diagnosis and treatment of dopaminergic disorders such as Parkinson's, schizophrenia, and depression.

Understanding AAC Usage and Needs through a Web Survey with Device Users and Families.

Augmentative and alternative communication devices (AAC) can help support communication for millions of people who have differences in speech and language abilities. Existing commercial devices do not meet all the diverse needs of some individuals. Interviews and surveys were conducted with individuals who have speech or language challenges (n=4 interviews; n=15 survey respondents), or their loved ones (n=9 interviews, n=49 survey respondents). Summaries of communication practices, usage preferences, and ratings of hypothetical devices are shown. We consolidate and present qualitative feedback on user difficulties and likes for types of available commercial devices. The collected quantitative data has been de-identified and published and may be useful for others working with AAC devices and users. Building on our results, we discuss how three directions for impactful AAC development - customizable input, context-aware output, and personalized devices - could help meet the needs expressed by survey respondents in the context of technological advancements and research in the field.

Dream engineering: Simulating worlds through sensory stimulation.

We explore the application of a wide range of sensory stimulation technologies to the area of sleep and dream engineering. We begin by emphasizing the causal role of the body in dream generation, and describe a circuitry between the sleeping body and the dreaming mind. We suggest that nearly any sensory stimuli has potential for modulating experience in sleep. Considering other areas that might afford tools for engineering sensory content in simulated worlds, we turn to Virtual Reality (VR). We outline a collection of relevant VR technologies, including devices engineered to stimulate haptic, temperature, vestibular, olfactory, and auditory sensations. We believe these technologies, which have been developed for high mobility and low cost, can be translated to the field of dream engineering. We close by discussing possible future directions in this field and the ethics of a world in which targeted dream direction and sleep manipulation are feasible.

Dormio: A targeted dream incubation device.

Information processing during sleep is active, ongoing and accessible to engineering. Protocols such as targeted memory reactivation use sensory stimuli during sleep to reactivate memories and demonstrate subsequent, specific enhancement of their consolidation. These protocols rely on physiological, as opposed to phenomenological, evidence of their reactivation. While dream content can predict post-sleep memory enhancement, dreaming itself remains a black box. Here, we present a novel protocol using a new wearable electronic device, Dormio, to automatically generate serial auditory dream incubations at sleep onset, wherein targeted information is repeatedly presented during the hypnagogic period, enabling direct incorporation of this information into dream content, a process we call targeted dream incubation (TDI). Along with validation data, we discuss how Dormio and TDI protocols can serve as tools for controlled experimentation on dream content, shedding light on the role of dreams in the overnight transformation of experiences into memories.

AttentivU: An EEG-Based Closed-Loop Biofeedback System for Real-Time Monitoring and Improvement of Engagement for Personalized Learning.

Information about a person's engagement and attention might be a valuable asset in many settings including work situations, driving, and learning environments. To this end, we propose the first prototype of a device called AttentivU-a system that uses a wearable system which consists of two main components. Component 1 is represented by an EEG headband used to measure the engagement of a person in real-time. Component 2 is a scarf, which provides subtle, haptic feedback (vibrations) in real-time when the drop in engagement is detected. We tested AttentivU in two separate studies with 48 adults. The participants were engaged in a learning scenario of either watching three video lectures on different subjects or participating in a set of three face-to-face lectures with a professor. There were three conditions administrated during both studies: (1) biofeedback, meaning the scarf (component 2 of the system) was vibrating each time the EEG headband detected a drop in engagement; (2) random feedback, where the vibrations did not correlate or depend on the engagement level detected by the system, and (3) no feedback, when no vibrations were administered. The results show that the biofeedback condition redirected the engagement of the participants to the task at hand and improved their performance on comprehension tests.

Wearable Motion-Based Heart Rate at Rest: A Workplace Evaluation.

This paper studies the feasibility of using low-cost motion sensors to provide opportunistic heart rate assessments from ballistocardiographic signals during restful periods of daily life. Three wearable devices were used to capture peripheral motions at specific body locations (head, wrist, and trouser pocket) of 15 participants during five regular workdays each. Three methods were implemented to extract heart rate from motion data and their performance was compared to those obtained with an FDA-cleared device. With a total of 1358 h of naturalistic sensor data, our results show that providing accurate heart rate estimations from peripheral motion signals is possible during relatively "still" moments. In our real-life workplace study, the head-mounted device yielded the most frequent assessments (22.98% of the time under 5 beats per minute of error) followed by the smartphone in the pocket (5.02%) and the wrist-worn device (3.48%). Most importantly, accurate assessments were automatically detected by using a custom threshold based on the device jerk. Due to the pervasiveness and low cost of wearable motion sensors, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of providing opportunistic large-scale low-cost samples of resting heart rate.

Wearable Lab on Body: Combining Sensing of Biochemical and Digital Markers in a Wearable Device.

Wearables are being widely researched for monitoring individual's health and wellbeing. Current generation wearable devices sense an individual's physiological data such as heart rate, respiration, electrodermal activity, and EEG, but lack in sensing their biological counterparts, which drive the majority of individual's physiological signals. On the other hand, biosensors for detecting biochemical markers are currently limited to one-time use, are non-continuous and don't provide flexibility in choosing which biomarker they sense. We present "wearable lab on body", a platform for active continuous monitoring of human biomarkers from the biological fluid. Our platform contains both digital sensors such as IMU for activity recognition, as well as an automated system for continuous sampling of biomarkers from saliva by leveraging already existing paper-based biochemical sensors. The platform could aid with longitudinal studies of biomarkers and early diagnosis of diseases.

An Exploration of Form Factors for Sleep-Olfactory Interfaces.

Releasing scent during sleep has been shown to influence the emotional valence of dreams, reduce cigarette smoking behavior, strengthen memories as well as enhance restorative slow-wave activity. Nevertheless, current scent technologies used in sleep laboratories are not portable and require the use of nasal masks and large olfactometers. In this paper we investigated the preferred form factor and acceptance of a set of biometric wearables that can release scent based on the user's physiological state. We conducted an online survey with 163 participants and evaluated 8 different form factors. The results showed that 73.5% of the subjects preferred the designs that are not wearable during the night but that can be worn during the day. We provide insights to take into account for the design of next generation sleep-olfactory technologies. We provide a literature review of sleep and scent studies and discuss the opportunities for well-being and memory applications.

AttentivU: a Biofeedback Device to Monitor and Improve Engagement in the Workplace.

Everyday work is becoming increasingly complex and cognitively demanding. A person's level of attention influences how effectively their brain prepares itself for action, and how much effort they apply to a task. However, the various distractions of the modern work environment often make it hard to pay and sustain attention. To address this issue, we present AttentivU - a system that uses wearable electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the attention of a person in real-time. When the user's attention level is low, the system provides real-time, subtle feedback to nudge the person to become attentive again. Users can choose to turn the device on or off based on whether their current task requires focused attention. We tested the system on 12 adults in a real workplace setting. The preliminary results show that the biofeedback redirects the attention of the participants to the task at hand and improves their performance.