{"id":50057,"date":"2021-09-10T19:28:04","date_gmt":"2021-09-10T19:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/?p=50057"},"modified":"2021-09-29T13:42:39","modified_gmt":"2021-09-29T13:42:39","slug":"resonance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/resonance\/","title":{"rendered":"Resonance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past 20 years, improvements in medical life-saving and life-sustaining technologies have created \u201ca new strain of human beings\u201d with minimal to no ability to interact with others.\u00a0 Caring for such individuals requires expertise from health sciences, technology, humanities and the arts, and the integration of deep creativity and innovation in practice.\u00a0 Across the care continuum, those working with unresponsive patients report a high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity in their practice, and high levels of distress and frustration.\u00a0 The crux of this uncertainty hinges on one central question: are these unresponsive individuals conscious or not?\u00a0 In this project, the BIAPT lab is testing the feasibility of a disruptive assemblage called <\/span>Resonance<\/b> to detect and augment consciousness in minimally communicative individuals.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Resonance consists of 1) a novel technology that translates brain signals associated with levels of consciousness into sound, and 2) therapeutic clowns, to enable the detection of consciousness. Our interdisciplinary team consists of engineers, therapeutic clowns, human-computer interaction specialists, social scientists and intensive care doctors.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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To develop Resonance, we conducted 5 workshops to explore, play with and develop the various technical and artistic threads which comprise Resonance.\u00a0 The technological, sonification, clinical, artistic and multisensory insights resulting from these workshops were used to design and implement the Resonance assemblage.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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We are currently actively recruiting patients in a disorder of consciousness to test the feasibility of using Resonance to support interpersonal interactions.\u00a0 The study consists of five visits to the participant\u2019s school or place of residence.\u00a0 In the first visit, a baseline electroencephalogram (EEG) will be recorded to characterize the participant\u2019s brain properties.\u00a0 During the remainder of the visits, a pair of therapeutic clowns will interact with the participant while music is generated from patterns of their brain signals in real-time.\u00a0 Therapeutic clowns have a nimble and adaptable repertoire of techniques (e.g. rhythm, touch, music) to create interpersonal connections with individuals of varying levels of responsiveness.\u00a0 The clowns will pay close attention to the brain-generated music and to any behavioral responses of the participant.\u00a0 As therapeutic clowns have a heightened sensitivity to minimal multisensory feedback, they are ideally placed to assess the impact of this technology on their own responsiveness to the participant, and to suggest ways that it can be used by others to enhance the quality of their interaction.<\/span><\/p>\n

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We anticipate that using Resonance with unresponsive individuals will 1) support hitherto unobtainable interpersonal connections with them, promoting their return to responsiveness; 2) provide critical information for caregiving decisions which depend on an individual\u2019s capacity for consciousness; 3) provide therapeutic clowns with a new medium for interaction with their clients; 4) democratize neuroscientific information by making it accessible to untrained caregivers; and 5) create an entirely new form of interpersonal interaction and connection, perturbing our current conception of consciousness, personhood and citizenship.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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This project is funded by an <\/span>AUDACE grant<\/span><\/a> from the <\/span>Fonds de Recherche du Quebec<\/span><\/a>, and is currently being led by Charlotte Maschke and Natalia Incio Serra.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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If you know an individual who may be a candidate for this study, please <\/span>contact us<\/span><\/a> directly.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Spin-off Projects<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. Assessing the effectiveness of online therapeutic clowning<\/b>.\u00a0 During the COVID-19 pandemic, our Resonance partner — Dr. Clown — switched from in-person visits to virtual clowning.\u00a0 This was the first time that therapeutic clowning had been attempted on this scale on an online platform, and Dr. Clown was interested in the effectiveness of their interactions.\u00a0 We interviewed therapeutic clowns and caregivers of patients who had received \u201cNose-to-Nose\u201d online visits to answer this question.\u00a0 We found that although all clowns and caregivers reported challenges and limitations with the medium, virtual therapeutic clowning was effective for empowering clients and forming therapeutic relationships.\u00a0 The clowns successfully used many strategies to maintain their core clowning competencies in a virtual environment.\u00a0 Our study also showed that virtual clowning may be more beneficial for some clients than in-person clowning, and has the potential to extend therapeutic clowning beyond its traditional domains of practice.
    \n<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Elder Clowning.<\/b>\u00a0 Therapeutic clowns are typically associated with pediatric patients, but actually practice across the lifespan.\u00a0 While increasing anecdotal and research evidence converge on the effectiveness of elder clowning, there is limited research on this practice.\u00a0 We are conducting interviews with therapeutic clowns across the world to determine elder clowning practices.\u00a0 In particular, we are interested in how the clowns adapt their practices to the personal, cognitive and cultural needs of their clients.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Over the past 20 years, improvements in medical life-saving and life-sustaining technologies have created \u201ca new strain of human beings\u201d with minimal to no ability to interact with others.\u00a0 Caring for such individuals requires expertise from health sciences, technology, humanities and the arts, and the integration of deep creativity and innovation in practice.\u00a0 Across the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":50058,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-assessing-consciousness","category-current-projects"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50057"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50203,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50057\/revisions\/50203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moraeslab.com\/biapt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}