Internet-Based Telehealth System for the Treatment of Agoraphobia

Abstract

In this work that is being validated within the VEPSY project, we present a system that allows the patient to continue a psychological virtual reality treatment from his or her home PC as complementary therapy. In the consulting room, we have been using virtual therapy for panic disorder and agoraphobia treatment to expose the patient to several situations. For the complementary therapy, a structured treatment via the Internet has been prepared, which consists of several parts: an assessment protocol; a structured treatment protocol organized in several blocks (such as psychoeducation and exposure); and an outcome protocol. The same situations as in the consulting room have been selected for the exposure, but each of them has been divided into several virtual environments with specific characteristics that limit its difficulty level. The stimuli that are used at each level are controlled automatically by the system. The information of the patient is stored in a database, which is placed in a remote server using XML format and used to control which stages of the treatment he or she can access. The psychologist can limit the evolution of the patient. The virtual environments are installed in the patient's PC, and they are implemented with a mechanism that ensures that they can only be run when the patient connects to the web. The user should not have any special virtual reality hardware at home, so head rotations have been simulated with the navigation system.