The metaphor of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) tries to picture a vision of the future where all of us will be surrounded by 'intelligent' electronic environments, and this ambient has claims to being sensitive and responsive to our needs. Ambient Intelligence without invasion of privacy represents a long-term vision for the EU Information Society Technologies Research programme. A strong multi-disciplinary and collaborative approach is a key requirement for large-scale technology innovation and the development of effective applications. Up to now, most of the books and papers related to AmI focus their analysis on the technology potential only. An important feature of this volume is the link between the technology - through the concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent interface - and the human experience of interacting in the world - through a neuro-psychological vision centred on the concept of 'presence'. Presence - the sense of being there - is the experience of projecting one's mind through media to other places, people and designed environments.The combination of recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience - which make it possible to acquire a better understanding of the human aspects of presence, and the breakthroughs at the level of the enabling technologies make it increasingly possible to build novel systems based on this understanding. The goal of this volume is to assess the technologies and processes that are behind the AmI vision, in order to help the development of state-of-the-art applications. More in detail, this volume aims at supporting researchers and scientists, interested in the understanding and exploiting the potential of AmI.

Drawing on research in the social sciences, communications, and other fields, this book wants to analyze how the online environment is influencing the experience of psychology. However, understanding how the Internet is changing our everyday experience presents a substantial challenge for the psychologists. Now, research in this area is still sparse and limited in both the number and scope of studies: actual research, especially studies with strict methodologies, is only just beginning. The contributions in this book are among the first scientific attempts to take a serious look at various aspects of Internet-related psychology. However, we need not start from scratch. Psychology has a broad knowledge about the factors that affect human behaviour in other setting. So, the papers collected for this book are descriptive and practical-oriented in nature.

To create successful health care applications with today's virtual environments, we must begin by asking: what are they good at? This book offers an answer to its potential readers - physicians, psychologists and health care provider - by presenting an overview of the current research in this field. In fact, the book, whose idea comes from the work made within the EC funded Virtual Reality Environments for Psycho-neuro-physiological assessment and Rehabilitation VREPAR - project, (HC 1053 - www.etho.be/ht_projects/vrepar), is a collection of chapters from researchers who have pioneered the ideas and the technology associated with virtual reality. More in particular, the book discusses the clinical principles, human factors, and technology issues associated with the use of virtual reality for assessment and treatment. It should be noted that technical characteristics of virtual worlds change very rapidly, but what will not change is the user of the virtual environment. Thus, to ensure that the contents of this book are not quickly updated, all the contributors have made a great effort to identify possible constraints in the use of this technology and to indicate how they can be faced and solved. The key issue was to integrate knowledge of clinical therapy and psychological principles related to human factors into the design of virtual environments. The book is divided in three main sections comprising 13 chapters overall: virtual reality for health care, virtual reality for psychological assessment and rehabilitation and virtual reality for neuro-physiological assessment and rehabilitation.

This concise volume presents for the first time a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other practical applications.

Virtual Reality (VR) offers the potential to develop human testing and training environments that allow for the precise control of complex stimulus presentations in which human cognitive and functional performance can be accurately assessed and rehabilitated. However, basic feasibility and human issues need to be addressed in order for this technology to be reasonably and efficiently applied in clinical psychology. The book, written in a scholarly style, will provide rationales for virtual reality's applicability in clinical psychology. We will review the relevant literature regarding theoretical and pragmatic issues for these applications, and provide a description of ongoing work developed world-wide. The topics directly involve critical issues for clinicians, designers and users, and will be discussed with scientific competence without neglecting clarity and empirical cases with suggestions for actual use. The book is divided in three main sections: VR in clinical psychology: opportunities and challenges, VR in treatment of phobias and VR in clinical assessment and therapy.

The goal of this book is to bring together ideas from several different disciplines in order to examine the focus and aims that drive rehabilitation intervention and technology development. Specifically, the chapters in this book address the questions of what research is currently taking place to further develop rehabilitation, applied technology and how we have been able to modify and measure responses in both healthy and clinical populations using these technologies. The following chapters are dedicated toward addressing these issues: 1) Does Training with Technology Add to Functional Gains?; 2) Are there Rules that Govern Recovery of Function?; 3) Using the Body's Own Signals to Augment Therapeutic Gains; 4) Technology Incorporates Cognition and Action; 5) Technology Enhances the Impact of Rehabilitation Programs; 6) Summary.

Cybertherapy, the integration of telehealth technologies with the Internet and shared virtual reality, is used for two reasons: either because there is no alternative, or because it is in some sense better than traditional medicine. Nevertheless, the benefits of cybertherapy, due to the variety of its applications and their uneven development, are not self-evident. However, the emergence of cybertherapy is supporting the cost-effectiveness of certain applications, such as assessment, rehabilitation and therapy in clinical psychology and neuroscience. Its key advantage is the possibility of sharing different media and different health care tools in a simple to use and easily accessible Interface. To date, some cybertherapy applications have improved the quality of health care, and later they will probably lead to substantial cost savings. However, cybertherapy is not simply a technology but a complex technological and relational process. In this sense, clinicians and health care providers that want to successfully exploit cybertherapy need to give significant attention to clinical issues, technology, ergonomics, human factors and organizational changes in the structure of the relevant health service. The goal of this volume is to analyze the processes by which cybertherapy applications will contribute to the delivery of state-of-the-art health services. Particular attention is given to the clinical use of virtual reality technology. More in detail, this volume aims at supporting clinicians and scientists, interested in the cybertherapy innovative approach, providing them clinical protocols for the treatment of eating disorders, social phobias, panic disorders and sexual dysfunctions.

The idea of complexity states that most things tend to organize themselves into recurring patterns, even when these patterns are not immediately visible to an external observer. The general name for the scientific field concerned with the behaviour over time of a dynamic system is "complexity theory". The dynamic systems - systems capable of changing over time - are the focus of this approach, and its concern is with the predictability of their behaviour. The systems of interest to the complexity theory, under certain conditions, perform in regular, predictable ways; under other conditions they exhibit behaviour in which regularity and predictability is lost. The concepts of stable and unstable behaviour are part of the traditional repertoire of physical science. What is novel is the concept of something in between - chaotic behaviour. For chaos here we refer to systems which display behaviour that, though it has certain regularities, defies prediction. How does the order emerge from the chaos? How can we predict the behaviour of a chaotic system? Over the last 30 years and more, trying to identify the hidden patterns behind chaotic behaviour became the focus of attention in a number of scientific disciplines. These range as widely as astronomy, chemistry, evolutionary biology, geology and psychology.

"Presence", the sense of "being there" in a mediated environment, has been applied to describe the user experience when interacting with advanced media interfaces such as virtual environments. Why examine the concept of presence? There are compelling practical and theoretical reasons. The definition of the construct of presence is of particular interest today because it has the potential relevance for the design and evaluation of a broad range of interactive and non-interactive media and applications in several areas such as medicine, entertainment, education and training. An enhanced sense of presence plays an important role in technologies such as the video telephone, high definition television (HDTV), 3G portable phones, home and arcade video games, the World Wide Web, and more. The book examines the different facets of the concept of presence. It begins by noting practical and theoretical reasons for studying this concept. Different theories of presence are identified and a detailed description of the concepts included in these conceptualizations is presented. Existing research and about the factors that encourage or discourage a sense of presence in media users as well as the physiological and psychological effects of presence are then outlined. Finally, suggestions concerning possible evolutions of this concept allowed by the diffusion of ambient intelligence and 3G portable communication are presented.

This open access book presents outstanding doctoral dissertations in Information Technology from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Information Technology has always been highly interdisciplinary, as many aspects have to be considered in IT systems. The doctoral studies program in IT at Politecnico di Milano emphasizes this interdisciplinary nature, which is becoming more and more important in recent technological advances, in collaborative projects, and in the education of young researchers.Accordingly, the focus of advanced research is on pursuing a rigorous approach to specific research topics starting from a broad background in various areas of Information Technology, especially Computer Science and Engineering, Electronics, Systems and Control, and Telecommunications. Each year, more than 50 PhDs graduate from the program. This book gathers the outcomes of the best theses defended in 2021-22 and selected for the IT PhD Award. Each of the authors provides a chapter summarizing his/her findings, including an introduction, description of methods, main achievements and future work on the topic. Hence, the book provides a cutting-edge overview of the latest research trends in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, presented in an easy-to-read format that will also appeal to non-specialists.

This concise volume presents for the first time a coherent and detailed account of why we experience feelings of being present in the physical world and in computer-mediated environments, why we often don't, and why it matters - for design, psychotherapy, tool use and social creativity amongst other practical applications.