Videogames as therapy: an updated selective review of the medical and psychological literature

There is a long history of using videogames in a therapeutic capacity including rehabilitation for stroke patients, people with traumatic brain injuries, burns victims, wheelchair users, Erb’s palsy sufferers, children undergoing chemotherapy, children with muscular dystrophy, autistic children and individuals looking to overcome real-life challenges (including symptoms of depression) and boost their wellbeing (including boosting life satisfaction, self-efficacy and social support). This paper briefly and selectively examines a number of areas including: (1) videogames as physiotherapy and occupational therapy, (2) videogames as distractors in the role of pain management, (3) videogames and cognitive rehabilitation, (4) videogames and the development of social and communication skills among the learning disabled, (5) videogames and impulsivity/attention deficit disorders, (6) videogames and therapeutic benefits in the elderly, (7) videogames in psychotherapeutic settings, (8) videogames and health care, (9) videogames and anxiety disorders, and (10) videogames and psychological wellbeing. It is concluded that there has been considerable success when games are specifically designed to address a specific problem or to teach a certain skill. However, generalizability outside the game-playing situation remains an important consideration

Fourier-Stieltjes transforms of measures with a certain continuity property

AbstractLet G be a compact abelian group whose dual group Γ has a finite torsion subgroup. Let μ ϵ M(G) such that ¦μ ¦assigns no mass to any coset of any closed subgroup of G whose index is infinite. Then there is d > 0, dependent only on ∥ μ ∥, such that if for each γ ϵ Γ, ¦\̂gm(γ)¦ ⩾ 1 or ¦\̂gm(γ)¦ ⩽ d, then the set {γ: ¦\̂gm(γ)¦ ⩾ 1} is finite. An upper bound on the cardinality of this set is obtained in terms of ∥ μ ∥and the cardinality of the torsion subgroup of Γ

Linearly Ordered Attribute Grammar Scheduling Using SAT-Solving

Many computations over trees can be specified using attribute grammars. Compilers for attribute grammars need to find an evaluation order (or schedule) in order to generate efficient code. For the class of linearly ordered attribute grammars such a schedule can be found statically, but this problem is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we show how to encode linearly ordered attribute grammar scheduling as a SAT-problem. For such grammars it is necessary to ensure that the dependency graph is cycle free, which we approach in a novel way by transforming the dependency graph to a chordal graph allowing the cycle freeness to be efficiently expressed and computed using SAT solvers. There are two main advantages to using a SAT-solver for scheduling: (1) the scheduling algorithm runs faster than existing scheduling algorithms on real-world examples, and (2) by adding extra constraints we obtain fine-grained control over the resulting schedule, thereby enabling new scheduling optimisations