It S Only A False Alarm

Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Childhood OCD

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) affects an estimated 2% of children in the United States and can cause considerable anxiety. OCD is characterized by a pattern of rituals (or compulsions) and obsessive thinking. Common obsessions among children and teens include a fear of dirt or germs, a need for symmetry, order, and precision, and a fear of illness or harm coming to oneself or relatives. Common compulsions include grooming, repeating, and cleaning rituals. These obsessions and compulsions can severely interfere with daily functioning and are a source of significant distress. Without adequate treatment, the quality of life for youths and families dealing with OCD often suffers. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has shown to be effective in the treatment of childhood OCD. This Therapist Guide outlines a 12-session CBT-based treatment for OCD that benefits not only children and adolescents, but their families as well. Each session incorporates a family therapy component in addition to individual treatment for the child. It is a combined approach program that educates the child and family about OCD in order to reduce negative feelings of guilt and blame and to normalize family functioning. This manual also provides guidelines for conducting both imaginal and in vivo exposures; techniques at the core of helping children reduce their anxiety. For use with children ages 8 17, this book is an indispensable resource for clinicians helping children and their families cope with OCD.

NASA Technical Paper

Activity monitoring and automatic alarm generation in AAL-enabled homes

In this work, novel contributions towards the emerging field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) are introduced. AAL is a concept envisioned in the early 2000s by the European Commission, aiming at supporting specifically senior people by means of technology and thus helping them to lead independent and self-determined lives in their accustomed surroundings as long as possible. Modern home automation technology is believed to be the key to providing various services in the fields of health, safety, comfort, and communication. In the framework of this thesis, health monitoring aspects are of particular interest. Inactivity monitoring is a very promising approach thereto since it allows the detection of potential health threats or cases of emergency without being overly privacy intrusive. Deriving condensed and dependable inactivity profiles representing typical user behaviour is a pivotal prerequisite for automatic emergency monitoring. Several methodologies for computing such patterns are introduced. Based on those inactivity profiles, various alarming criteria (i.e., permissible inactivity thresholds) are utilised to trigger alarms automatically if the users' inactivity levels exceed individual, user-dependant limits. Since false alarms are inevitable in automatic alarming systems, a procedure of handling them is introduced as well. Finally, the real-world application of the devised AAL system is illustrated.