Geoff Williams

EPA-0259 – Reducing the frequency and severity of voices: the avatar clinical trial

Around a quarter of people suffering from psychotic conditions, like schizophrenia, continue to experience auditory hallucinations despite adequate drug treatment. In addition to medication, some help is also provided by psychological interventions, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis (CBTp). AVATAR therapy is based on computer technology which enables each patient to create an avatar of the entity (human or non-human) that they believe is talking to them. The therapist promotes a dialogue between the patient and the avatar in which the avatar progressively comes under the patients control. These sessions are audio recorded and provided to the patient on an MP3 player for continued use at home. In an initial pilot study, a maximum of 7 sessions lasting 30 minutes resulted in highly significant reductions in the patients’ hallucinations and the associated distress, enhancing the quality of their life (Leff et al., 2013). Our objective is to replicate the findings of this pilot study of the AVATAR therapy. We will carry out a randomised controlled evaluation of computer assisted voice therapy compared to supportive counselling to determine preliminary estimates of both effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. The study aims to recruit 142 people who have suffered from auditory hallucinations for at least 12 months despite taking medication regularly. Participants will complete a number of selfcompleted and interview based measures (on four assessment points: pre-treatment, post treatment, and then at 12 and 24 weeks follow-up) to assess the impact of interventions on outcomes and to explore potential mediators and modifiers of therapy.

Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine 2015: Virtual Reality in Healthcare: Medical Simulation and Experiential Interface

Neuropsychological disorders are common in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients. Executive functions, verbal fluency and verbal memory, shifting attention from one aspect of stimuli to others, mental flexibility, engaging in executive planning and decision making, are the most involved cognitive domains. We focus on two aspects of neuropsychological function: decision making and cognitive behavioral flexibility, assessed through a virtual version of the Multiple Errand Test (V-MET), developed using the NeuroVR software. Thirty OCD patients were compared with thirty matched control subjects. The results showed the presence of difficulties in OCD patients with tasks where the goal is not clear, the information is incomplete or the parameters are ill-defined.

A randomized clinical trial of a novel audio-visual assisted therapy aid for refractory auditory hallucinations (AVATAR therapy)

Abstract presented at the 9th International Conference on Early Psychosis To the New Horizon, 17 November 2014, Tokyo, Japan

Multilingual speech recognition based on phonological elements

Phoneme‐based approaches to ASR can achieve good performances in medium‐sized vocabularies for individual languages. Transfer to a different target language, however, generally produces poor results. An alternative, phonologically based model which uses a set of seven universal subsegmental elements as recognition targets is presented. The elements are phonologically monovalent and are postulated to have a direct encoding in the acoustic signal. Speech segments are expressed in terms of elements and recognition proceeds by identifying the elements present in the speech signal. This model, evolved from government phonology theory, forms the basis of a single recognition module which can be applied to most languages by selection of the appropriate lexicon and linguistic constraints. Initial experiments to test this approach have used perceptually based front ends and a MLP classifier. For each element, individual neural nets were trained on the TIMIT (American‐English) database. These classifiers were then ...