As part of our activities, we would like to share that we participated on March 25 in the round tables of the Connect 2023 channel at the Canal Isabel II Theatres. At table 2, The extended perception: the hacking of systems. Our colleague Ana Tajadura with Mónica Rikic, electronic artist; Enrique Radigales, artist, curator, and researcher. And as moderator Ricardo Iglesias, multimedia artist and philosopher. You can read more information here.

Our colleague Ana Tajadura the last  March 24, 2023 participated in The Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) Seminar Series 2022-2023 via Zoom with the talk The Hearing Body: Sound-driven Body Transformation Experiences and Applications for Emotional and Physical Health. See more information here.

We are pleased to share that last Friday 3rd March we participated in the great technology event called T3chfest 2023 at the Carlos III University of Madrid with the talk Hacking the senses: body transformation experiences with wearables. You can watch our full talk on the Youtube Channel of the event.

In the Talk also participated our colleagues Amar D’Ádamo, Laia Turmo Vidal, Jose Manuel Vega Cebrían, and Laura Alonso Alonso.

Our colleague Ana Tajadura-Jiménez was invited to a research seminar at  Queen Mary – University of London. Ana presented the talk called “The Hearing Body: Sound-driven Body Transformation Experiences and Applications for Emotional and Physical Health”. The seminar was Wednesday 8 February 202, in the C4DM-CogSci workshop on Body-centred perspectives on human-human and human-machine interaction.

Abstract:

Body perceptions are important for people’s motor, social and emotional functioning. Critically, neuroscientific research has shown that body perceptions are not fixed, but are continuously updated through sensorimotor information. In this talk, I will present work from our group on how sound and other sensory feedback on one’s body and actions can be used to alter body perception, creating Body Transformation Experiences. I will talk about how neuroscientifically grounded insights that body perceptions are continuously updated through sensorimotor information may contribute to the design of novel body-centred technologies to support people’s needs and for behaviour change. I will then present various studies from our current project, Magic OutFit, aimed to inform the design of wearable technology in which sensory-driven changes in body perception are used to enhance behavioural patterns and emotional states in the context of exertion. I will discuss how apart from the focus on real-life applications, novel technologies for body sensing and sensory feedback may also become a research tool for investigating how emotional and multisensory processes shape body perception. I will conclude by identifying new challenges and opportunities that this line of work presents, some of which we are addressing in our current ERC project BODYinTRANSIT.

January 19, 2023

We are happy to announce the AcademiaNet team at the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), invited our colleague to be part of the AcademiaNet – the expert database for outstanding female academics.
The database at www.academia-net.org lists more than 3’500 profiles of top-class female researchers of all disciplines. All of them were nominated by distinguished European research organizations because of their outstanding qualifications and achievements. Universities, research institutions, companies, and the media use AcademiaNet when they are looking for senior staff, board and committee members, keynote speakers, and experts. See the Ana profile here.

January 19, 2023

Our colleague Ana Tajadura-Jiménez in collaboration with Dan Casas from the University Rey Juan Carlos, Chus Rodríguez from Skydance Animation, and Alonso Becerril from “La tecnocreativa” were part of the discussion panel of Madrid In Game- Summit22, titled “Identity and perception of the digital and virtual self”, the event was last December 1, 2022.

We are very happy to announce the Chapter Sensing the body through sound by Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Merle T. Fairhurst, Ophelia Deroy in the chapter  in the 1st edition of the book The Routledge Handbook of Bodily Awareness You can find it here.

Abstract: Music makes us dance and move, but can sounds do more for our body? We may easily think that hearing is the least relevant modality for our sense of bodily self, compared, for instance, to touch, vision and interoception. Yet audition provides rich information about what is happening inside and crucially outside of our bodies: we hear ourselves breathing, or our joints crack; we hear our hands clapping against each other or stroking a piece of velvet; we hear the sounds of our footsteps mixing with those of others as we go down the stairs. Rarely is there an action or event that we are involved in which is silent, and yet audition remains relatively ignored as a contributor to our sense of self.

Órbita Laika revealed how science creates amazing illusions that defy our perception. Magic, like illusionism, has had an unstoppable evolution.

In our section, we show how to change the signals of the senses to “hack” your brain. We present our work, technologies that can change the perception of the body using sound illusions, all based on neuroscience research. 

Watch us on the episode on the “Órbita laika” website aired on October 18, 2022

We invited you to participate in our workshop in Science Week and Innovation 2022. This participatory workshop focuses on exploring and designing sensory technology as a group to promote physical activity. In the workshop, participants are invited to explore how certain sensations of some materials and technology affect the perception of our body and invite us to move (do physical activity). The designs made in our laboratory will be tested, and we will reflect as a group on what works and what does not work for each one to activate and perform physical activity, and we will co-design adaptations or even new designs using the sensory materials and technology

Details: science week and innovation 2022
Contact: jley@inf.uc3m.es or ovaldivi@inf.uc3m.es

See you: November 11, 2022 at 17:00.

On October 14, our colleague Ana Tajadura-Jiménez gave a fantastic talk at the symposium “ELEMENT Days: symposium and workshop” as a speaker invited on Theme 2: Learning or Re-Learning Movements. You can see her talk on Youtube of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM).

Last September 30 at the UC3M auditorium. Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and other fantastic researchers participated in this scientific dissemination event on various aspects related to our well-being, such as water, pollution caused by airplanes, the health of our cells or the impact of technology on the perception of our body. You can see more of this event in this link.

Our colleague Ana Tajadura at “The Pathological Body: The perception and the experience of the body in diseases” conference, presented an interesting talk on the role of sonification in updating body representation and its impact on pain rehabilitation and motor function. The talk was very well received by the audience, who actively participated in the question and answer session. You can see more of this event in this link.

September 9, 2022

Ana Tajadura-Jiménez presented her poster at the Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF 2022) in Ulm, Alemania on July 4-7, with her work entitled: “The soundtrack of my body: Implicit body weight distortions in auditory-driven body illusion in subclinical and clinical eating disorders”. You can see more information of the conference website here.

Judith Ley-Flores presented her research work at the Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF 2022) in Ulm, Alemania on July 4-7, with her work entitled: “Sounds changing in pitch interact with proprioception when paired with body movement, affecting motor behaviour and bodily feelings“. You can see the conference website here, and the article of this poster  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-06210-x

Judith Ley-Flores presented her research work at the 9th Iberian Conference on Perception (CIP2022) in Barcelona on June 29, with her work entitled: “Using movement sonification to alter body perception and promote physical activity in physically inactive people”. You can see the conference website here.

This June 22-24 we present our work at the 8th international Conference on Movement and Computing (MOCO) with the work titled: “Exploring the Design Space for Body Transformation Wearables to Support Physical Activity through Sensitising and Bodystorming” by Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Judith Ley-Flores, Omar Valdiviezo, Aneesha Singh, Milagrosa Sánchez-Martín, Joaquín Díaz Durán and Elena Márquez Segura. See the web page of the conference here.

Judith Ley-Flores was invited to the seminar on emerging technologies by the Technological Institute of Sonora, Mexico. She gave a talk about her thesis work on “Using movement sonification to alter body perception and promote physical activity in physically inactive people”. See the video of the talk here.

Last May our colleague Ana Tajadura gave a talk at the annual convention of psychological Scientists. As part of the symposium “Real Bodies in a Real World: Multisensory and Embodied Signatures of Self-Environment Interactions”. Here, Ana talked about the work titled: “My Sounding Body in Interaction with the World: Auditory-Driven Changes in the Sense of Bodily Self”. See the web page of the conference here.

Poster presentation by @Snavasleon on a study on saccadic abnormalities and eating disorders. Recent research indicates that patients with anorexia (AN) show specific eye movement abnormalities. However, it remains unknown whether these abnormal eye movement patterns, which may serve as potential biomarkers and endophenotypes for an early diagnosis and preventive clinical treatments, start to manifest also in people with subclinical eating disorders (ED) symptomatology. The results may open opportunities for developing novel diagnostic tools/therapies being helpful to the EDs research community and allied fields. Read more in 10.1186/s40337-022-00573-2

Kristi Kuusk participated in the exhibition that presented works by students and teaching staff of the Estonian Academy of Arts. The objective was to see how emerging technological approaches are demonstrated, in which textile, interwoven with digital properties or technology at different levels, mediates collaborative processes in design of social interaction. See more here.

Interview with Ana Tajadura Jiménez, She is pioneer in the use of acoustics to improve body image. Her research brings together the fields of engineering, applied acoustics, human-computer interaction and cognitive neuroscience. How do these elements come together? What for?
For answers to these questions and others, we invite you to read the article in my+d

Ana Tajadura-Jiménez is researching how to change the perception of our body with shoes that change the sound of our steps or suits that help us stay healthy.

“Our way of self-perception is through our senses. If I change that information, I can make them perceive their body differently.”

We are in Vogue (Brazil), come and read about how connected fabrics technology will transport us from visual to sensory fashion.  The texture of a fabric. The fit of a garment. The smell of new clothes. The material against our skin. Sensory is part of fashion, just like technology. But how to amplify the sensory experience in fashion in a digital environment? The answer is smart textiles.

Registration here: Questionnaire

We invited you to participate in our workshop in the Science Week. The idea is to reflect on your bodily sensations in our movements, co-design as a group, while we interact with technologies that can change your body perception through sound feedback during movement to promote physical activity.

Details: science week and innovation
Contact: jley@inf.uc3m.es
See you: November 12, 2021

We are happy to announce 3 fully-funded postdoc positions and a research engineer/technician position at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, as part of the Consolidator Grant Horizon2020 project BODYinTRANSIT: Sensory-driven body transformation experiences on-the-move, led by Prof. Ana Tajadura-Jiménez

1. Post-doc 1: Post-Doctoral Researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience on Body Transformation Experiences
   Duration: 24 months (through renewable 1-year contracts).
2. Post-doc 2: Post-Doctoral Researcher in Human-Computer Interaction for Body Transformation Experiences
   Duration: 24 months (through renewable 1-year contracts).
3. Post-doc 3: Post-Doctoral Researcher in Machine Learning for Dynamic Body Blueprints
   Duration: 36 months (through renewable 1-year contracts).
4. Research Engineer/Technician in Sensorial Technologies and Inner Fashion Prototypes for Body Transformation Experiences
   Duration: 48 months (through renewable 1-year contracts).

Details: bodyintransit project
Application deadline: 15 October 2021

Sergio Navas presents the work called “New evidence of validity and reliability of the Barriers for Physical Activity Questionnaire in a general Spanish sample (BQPA-G). Also in colaboration with Ana Tajadura–Jiménez, Milagrosa Sánchez-Martín, Aneesha Singh, Mercedes Borda-Más, Nadia Berthouze-Bianchi, and Luis Morales Márquez. The work is presented today (July 22, 2021) at EAM2021. We invite you to see this amazing work here!

We invite you to read a fantastic article. Our colleagues Kristi Kuusk, Aleksander Väljamäe, and Ana Tajadura-Jimenez talk about how smart textiles contribute to body sensations and emotional states. Imagine …. to feel more like clouds, more like water or rocks state… through vibrating fabrics!. Read the article at this link.

Social Bridges e-conference: “The near-future of AI: How will humans and AI interact in 5 years?”

Congratulations to Ana! for the presentation of the work “The multisensorial body in a technology-mediated world” organized by Universitat der Bundeswehr Munchen at Social Bridges e-conference, April 21-23, 2021. See the program at this link.

Virtual Journals – SEPEX 2021

We invite you to see the posters of our colleagues Sergio Navas (@Snavasleon) and Judith Ley-Flores (@Judith_Ley), They will share their work tomorrow and will be answering your questions by Twitter, April 20-22, 2021. @SEPEX13

See you on @MagicOutFit!

Symposium on “Technological Bonding”

Date: 26th to 28th, March 2021

We are happy to announce the participation of Ana Tajadura-Jimenez in the Virtual Symposium on “Technological Bonding”. The symposium’s goal is to present to the academic community the most recent and innovative projects with biomedical and biological applications on issues of our modern society. NEB-FEUP/ICBAS XII

Date: Friday 19 – Sunday 21, March 2021
Free entry

We invite you to celebrate International Poetry Day with this installation that can be visited on the ground floor of Casa del Lector in the Matadero. In addition to the interactive experience, throughout the day there will also be small dance pieces to activate the installation.

ACM CHI 2021
Friday May 13 – Saturday May 14, 2021 | UTC 1200 – 1500
Submissions deadline: February 21 (23:59 AoE)

Call for Participation
We invite researchers, practitioners, and designers with an interest in creating inclusive multisensory interactions for people of all abilities to submit position papers of up to 4 pages in single-column SIGCHI submission template (including references) stating their existing work, a conceptual design, or their position with respect to the workshop topic. Submissions should also include up to two discussion points and issues that participants would like to discuss in the workshop. We also welcome alternate submissions in the form of presentation slides, design sketches, and posters. Authors must ensure the accessibility of their submission by following the SIGCHI Accessibility Guidelines. See all details here

Please note that while the position is to start in the summer 2021, the application deadline is September 2020.

Our article was presented at 9th European Congress of Methodology EAM 2020 Virtual Phase – 31 July 2020, by Sergio Navas-León, Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Patricia Rick, Luis Morales Márquez, Mercedes Borda Mas, Aneesha Singh, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, Milagrosa Sánchez Martín.

Our fantastic research team!