Are you scared of heights? How do you feel about trying to cure those fears by taking a trip to the top of New York’s One World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere? Perhaps counterintuitively, such a terrifying scenario may actually be one of the best ways to overcome acrophobia, according to a treatment known as exposure therapy.
This therapy is something that Lithuanian software development company TeleSoftas wants to help with, courtesy of its “VR Inner Child” software, an immersive virtual reality tool created to help psychotherapists treat phobias. The VR experience involves a hyper-realistic simulation in which patients face a child version of their virtual selves, who then guides them through the dizzying rooftop scene under a therapist’s supervision.
“The so-called ‘inner child’ interacts with the patient, gradually helping him or her overcome a specific fear — in this case the fear of heights — by tapping into the patient’s free inner child ego state,” Vytautas Kemesis, TeleSoftas’ chief technology officer, told Digital Trends. “While interacting with our inner child, we challenge our deeply held beliefs that form in early childhood, before our critical receptors are mature.”
-The therapist tracks the patient’s stress parameters live at all times, and can adjust the actions of the avatar accordingly. Stress=level monitoring is carried out via sensors in a wrist-worn tracker, as well as the VR headset itself. Metrics that are measured include eye movement, heartbeat, perspiration, and skin temperature. These stress parameters allow a patient to be safely pushed to their limits and overcome their anxiety over a period of time — courtesy of a gamified system that lets them try and improve on their previous numbers.
“There haven’t been any clinical trials yet to prove its effectiveness,” Kemesis said. “However, transactional analysis theory, which is what our technology is based on, has been applied for many years to treat various mental disorders and phobias. VR Inner Child is [currently] only a prototype created to show the possibilities that open when IT and medical experts combine their know-how and collaborate to challenge the mental health care industry.”
A demo of the experience will be shown off next week at Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Oh, and if you’re not afraid of heights, subsequent phobia-challenging VR experiences promise to include open and closed spaces, public speaking, and spiders!
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.