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painstudieslab

Jul 04 2012
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Mobini: Can technology help people suffering from depression?

By | Lab Updates

Thanks to her Simon Fraser University Undergraduate Student Research Award, Maryam Mobini has joined SFU’s Transforming Pain Research Group, where she is investigating the feasibility of applying technological means as potential treatment options or interventions for people who are suffering from depression.

Mobini hopes to work with health care experts to develop an affordable non-medical, and non-invasive means of treating North American adults suffering from mild depression and related feelings of anxiety, hopelessness, sadness, and fatigue, in their own homes.

She’s working under Dr. Diane Gromala, director of the Transforming Pain Research Group (TPRG). Mobini says she chose to work with Gromala’s lab because of their area of research.

“Chronic pain has an enormous overlap with depression,” Mobini says. “Depression and pain symptoms commonly coexist, exacerbate or attenuate one another, and appear to share biological pathways and neurotransmitters.”

Mobini was a fourth-year student in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at SFU when she received the award in 2012. She’s now enrolled in the masters program at SIAT, and continues to do research in the Pain Lab.

“During my time in the lab I was able to work more efficiently and get a better sense of what unique challenges accrue to working with patients, physicians, and specific technologies and methods of communication that are necessary for successful research outcomes,” she says. “I also acquired a holistic sense of what it is like to work in a diverse team, multiple ways to approach issues like depression and anxiety, and how to conduct research from the beginning of a project (anxiety) to the delivery stage of a project which is now being tested in clinics.”

She says she’s looking forward to working with Gromala and the other members of the lab as she pursues her graduate degree.

“As part of the research group, I am developing ideas for the use of technologies that may help with chronic pain and depression.”

Jul 04 2012
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Webinar: The Chronic Pain Conundrum

By | Events

The Canadian Institute for the Relief of Pain and Disability and PainBC, with the support of the Canadian Pain Coalition, are launching a new webinar series, “Chronic Pain, Improving Life While Living It”. This free webinar series, provides an opportunity for for people living with pain as well as their families to learn from top researchers and practitioners how to live well with chronic pain.

The first webinar takes place July 25.

TOPIC: The Chronic Pain Conundrum: Current issues in research, awareness, education, access to care

Barry Sessle MDS, PhD (Professor & Canada Research Chair, Faculties of Dentistry and Medicine, U of T

Despite many recent advances over the past 40 years in the understanding of pain mechanisms, and in pain diagnosis and treatment, considerable gaps in knowledge, education and practice remain, with chronic pain present in epidemic proportions in most countries.

DATE: July 25, 2011 11:00 am noon (PDT) / 2 – 3:00 pm (EDT)

REGISTER NOW!

LEARN MORE about CIRPD and this webinar series 

May 31 2012
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Proof-of-Process exhibit/workshop

By | Collaborations, Events

Pain Lab researchers Tyler Fox and Carlos Castellanos, along with former lab researcher Steven Barnes and SIAT student Diego Maranan, will be presenting an exhibit and workshop at Gallery Gachet in Vancouver called Proof-of-Process.

The exhibit takes place June 5-10 at the gallery, which is located in Gastown, 88 East Cordova Street.

Proof-of-Process consists of a series of a hybrid exhibitions, workshops and symposia where participants, along with artists-researchers, can interact with and collaborate on, the development of science and technology-based artworks and research projects in various stages of development all within a publicly accessible laboratory and production workshop set-up in the gallery space. We seek to engender an atmosphere of critical engagement and experimentation where the experience of the work unfolds through its direct manipulation. Visitors are invited not only to view and interact with projects, they are also encouraged to directly manipulate components and actively change the configuration of systems. Unplug, rewire, and experiment.

For more information or to register visit the project website at http://dprime.org/projects/proof-of-process/

May 17 2012
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Video games in the classroom

By | Events

Pain lab researcher Terry Lavender led a workshop on using video games in the post-secondary classroom called First-Person Tutor. The workshop took place at SFUs Symposium on Teaching and Learning: Leading Change on May 17. The workshop ended with a lively debate on how to use Grand Theft Auto in a Criminology course and Angry Birds in a Physics course. The presentation can be found here.

May 16 2012
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Vidyarthi presents Sonic Cradle at TEDActive

By | Events

Jay Vidyarthi presented his Sonic Cradle meditative biofeedback system at TEDActive 2012, held in Palm Springs February 27-March 2.

The annual conference aims to bring together innovative doers and thinkers to soak up remarkable ideas – and in a voice uniquely theirs, reflect them out to the world, according to the TEDActive website.

In the Sonic Cradle, the participant is placed inside a sensory-deprivation chamber and given the ability to write a song by breathing—the experience is difficult for participants to describe, and since it’s in their heads, the video only documents the surroundings. “The goal,” said Vidyarthi, “is to [alleviate] stress and anxiety by helping people learn how to mediate and giving them a meditative experience well beyond their actual ability.”

For more information about the Sonic Cradle, click here.

May 15 2012
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Sonic Cradle gets honourable mention at DIS2012

By | Conferences

Sonic Cradle: Designing for an Immersive Experience of Meditation by Connecting Respiration to Music, by Jay Vidyarthi, Diane Gromala and Bernhard Riecke, has been awarded honourable mention at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems 2012 conference, which takes place June 11-15 in Newcastle, UK.

Heres the description of the Sonic Cradle in the conference program: Could an interactive system trigger the psychological benefits of meditation? We are pursuing an answer to this question through a systematic research through design approach which explores a psychological framework of media immersion. Our approach has generated Sonic Cradle: an interactive system aimed at combining sensory deprivation, respiratory biofeedback and music into a mediated experience of mindfulness.

May 13 2012
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Pain Lab has a GRAND time in Montreal

By | Conferences

The Transforming Pain Research Group presented two papers and two posters at the annual GRAND NCE conference in Montreal, May 2-4, 2012.

Jay Vidyarthi presented his paper on Encouraging Meditative Experiences through Respiratory-Musical Interaction, while Terry Lavender presented his paper on Impression Management Work: How Seniors With Chronic Pain Address Disruptions in Their Interactions, which was co-written with Alison Benjamin, Jeremy Birnholtz, Ron Baecker, Diane Gromala and Andrea Furlan.

Two posters were also presented Sound Tonic: A Receptive Method for Managing Pain through Interactive Sound Design”, by Mark Nazemi, Diane Gromala and Maryam Mobini; and “Aesthetics of Experience: a Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of the Haptic Creature”, by Tyler Fox, Mark Nazemi, Diane Gromala and Karon MacLean.

Nazemi and Gromala also participated in a conference mash-up on Anxiety, Pain, Ability, Strain: Technologies to mediate the mind/body at the conference.

Apr 19 2012
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Gromala receives NSERC grant for VR research

By | Awards, Lab Updates

Transforming Pain Research Group director Dr. Diane Gromala has been awarded a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) grant for research into VR Systems for Body Image and Body Schema.

With the grant, the pain lab has now received research recognition and support from all of Canadas major grant-awarding bodies NSERC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and the National Research Council (NRC).