User:Rx8

Welcome to Vera Xu's Homepage!!! About Me

I'm a freshman in Pratt School of Engineering. I live in Wilson. I'm taking EGR103, MATH212, CHEM201, PSY105 this semester.

How to pronounce my name

My Chinese name is Ruolan, which means "like an orchid" in Chinese. It sounds like "R wo--LAN.' My family name is Xu, which sounds like 'SYu'. In Chinese name system, the family name comes first. So the order should be Xu Ruo Lan, which includes three characters. Or you can just call me Vera.

Grand Challenges of Engineering: Enhance Virtual Reality

Social phobia is one of the most frequent psychiatric disorders and is accessible to two forms of scientifically validated treatments: anti-depressant drugs and cognitive-behavioral therapies. Graded exposure to feared social situations (either in vivo or by imagining the situations) is fundamental to obtain an improvement of the anxious symptoms. Virtual reality (VR) may be an alternative to these standard exposure techniques and seems to bring significant advantages by allowing exposures to numerous and varied situations. Moreover studies have shown that human subjects are appropriately sensitive to virtual environments. This chapter reports the definition of a VR-based clinical protocol and a study to treat social phobia using virtual reality techniques. The virtual environments used in the treatment reproduce four situations that social phobics feel the most threatening: performance, intimacy, scrutiny and assertiveness. With the help of the therapist, the patient learns adapted cognitions and behaviors when coping with social situations, with the aim of reducing her or his anxiety in the corresponding real life situations. Some studies have been carried out using virtual reality in the treatment of fear of public speaking, which is only a small part of the symptomatology of most of social phobic patients. The novelty of our work is to address a larger group of situations that the phobic patients experience with high anxiety. In our protocol, the efficacy of the virtual reality treatment is compared to well established and well validated group cognitive-behavioral treatment.

Virtual reality exposure in the treatment of social phobia , Klinger E, Stud Health Technol Inform, updated 2004, accessed 13 September 2013

My favorite demonstration in MATLAB

My favorite is the one about plotting 3-D surface, because it teaches me about how to graph mesh plot, surface plot etc. using simple codes in MATLAB. It really helps me a lot to understand the 3-D concept in my Math class.

Reference

Virtual reality exposure in the treatment of social phobia , Klinger E, Stud Health Technol Inform, updated 2004, accessed 13 September 2013

Dr.G's Home Page, Michael Gustafson, Duke University, updated 19 February 2013, accessed 13 Sept 2013