Monthly Archives

January 2019

Jan 06 2019
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Pain Studies Lab’s HQP Weina Jin attended AGE-WELL’s Summer Institute

By | Awards, Events, Other News, Projects

Weina Jin, a Ph.D. student in the Pain Studies Lab, was selected amongst a competitive group of HQPs (highly qualified personnel), as 1 of 18 recipients of AGE-WELL’s 3rd Annual EPIC Summer Institute (http://agewell-nce.ca/training/summerinstitute) in Banff, Alberta from June 18 – 22, 2018. AGE-WELL is a Canada-wide research network and National Centre of Excellence (NCE).

The theme of this year’s AGE-WELL Summer Institute was “Co-Creating Possibilities: Leisure, Recreation, and Wellness – Opportunities for Engaging the Older Adult”. In this one-week project-based learning experience, multidisciplinary teams worked through a design process, from problem definition to brainstorming solutions, developing business models and knowledge mobilization plans, to successfully pitching the projects.

Weina and her team created a project to increase seniors’ engagement in a variety of activities. They designed a mobile app they named “PlayWell.” It recommends engaging activities for newly-retired populations to fight against boredom. During the development of the projects, the team received mentorship from AGE-WELL members about defining a problem definition with stakeholders, designing a business model and developing a market strategy.

Recipients of AGE-WELL’s 3rd Annual EPIC Summer Institute at Banff.

Jan 04 2019
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Pain Studies Lab presents AI research at IEEE GEM 2018

By | Conference Papers, Conferences, Papers, Publications

Weina Jin, a Pain Studies Lab Ph.D. student, presented her research on using machine learning to predict cybersickness at the IEEE GEM 2018 conference in Galway, Ireland on August 17, 2019.

In her 20-minute talk, Weina outlined the challenges of building predictive models for cybersickness research. To address these problems, she and her colleagues used a pure data-driven approach. They constructed a dataset for this problem, collected VR gameplay data labeled with a cybersickness core and built machine learning models. In their pilot study, results showed that their machine learning could model cybersickness in real-world VR gameplay settings. The presentation was part of Session 3.4: Deep Learning Techniques for GEM.

Their full peer-reviewed paper will appear in the IEEE GEM’s Conference Proceedings: “Automatic Prediction of Cybersickness for Virtual Reality Games” by Weina Jin, Jianyu Fan, Diane Gromala and Philippe Pasquier.

The IEEE GEM (Game, Entertainment, and Media) 2018 conference is a platform for disseminating innovative research and development work on game, entertainment, and media technologies.

Jan 03 2019
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Pain Studies Lab Ph.D. student Xin Tong is collaborating with a prominent pain doctor & motor control expert at Peking U. in Beijing

By | Collaborations, Lab Updates

Xin Tong, one of the lab’s Ph.D. students, is conducting her dissertation research in Peking University’s Motor Control Lab with Dr. Kunlin Wei, one of the top brain and cognition scientists in China.

Xin’s research is mainly about

  1. identifying the major factors in Virtual Reality (VR) that affect pain perception, and
  2. how to use Virtual Reality to help chronic pain patients to better manage their pain.

Her studies focus on the sense of body ownership, the sense of body agency, and the senses of controllability, movement and physical activity in VR, and how they may influence pain perception in both healthy participants as well as pain patients. Eventually, she plans to apply those research findings and scientific results to the lab’s VR.

Currently, Xin is working with pain patients who live with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), as shown in the picture below. This patient has experienced CRPS-related pain for over four years in his feet and hands. Before using the VR environment, the patient he rated his pain level as a 10 — almost always, and almost everywhere in his hands and feet. After engaging with the Pain Studies Lab’s VR title LumaPath for around 20 minutes, the patient rated his pain level to be 8, which lasts for a short period.

Although this result occurred after only one “dose” of VR, the result was significant, particularly because this patient’s pain is unrelenting. Therefore, over the next 8 to 10 weeks, Xin will follow up with a group of pain patients to measure the effects of using VR over time, and to see if those effects persist.

Pain patients with unrelenting Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) using Pain Studies Lab’s Lumapath, an immersive VR environment specifically designed for chronic pain patients. Ethics and permission to use these photos were granted.