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Biomedical subjects

Mariano Alcañiz

Publications and source records attributed to Mariano Alcañiz.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Clinically significant virtual environments for the treatment of panic disorder and agoraphobia.

The aim of this work is the description of virtual environments designed to apply exposure therapy in the treatment of panic disorder and agoraphobia. The program allows the simultaneous exposure to two different kinds of stimuli usually avoided by panic disorder and agoraphobia sufferers (external and interoceptive). The characteristics of the virtual environments are described, as well as the target behaviors that can be simulated with these virtual environments.

Agoraphobia↗
PubMed2004

New technologies for providing remote psychological treatments.

New technologies lead us to a series of new applications that we could not imagine just a few years before. Many services have appeared for Internet, the global computer network: FTP, e-mail, World Wide Web. Psychological treatments are one of the multiple applications that can be developed using these tools. Dynamic web pages that include information prepared by the therapist for different patients and that receive information from them can be generated. Other tools such as e-mail or chats can be used to provide a direct communication. Databases can be integrated in web applications for storing data about different patients. Several formats can be used for storing the information, and some of them such as XML provide a promising method of psychological data standardization. Using different development tools, virtual environments can also be generated and integrated in web pages, so new psychological treatments such as virtual environment exposure are also possible from web applications. This entire basis provides the structure that allows that new applications can be imagined and developed. In a few years, new trends will appear, probably one of them will be the use of wireless devices to provide psychological treatment and help at any place and any time.

Internet↗
PubMed2004

Technological background of VR.

User interface (UI) design is a critical component of any virtual environment (VE) application, and especially for VE applied to medicine. User interfaces for VE are becoming more diverse. Mice, keyboards, windows, menus, and icons--the standard parts of traditional WIMP interfaces--are still prevalent, but nontraditional devices and interface components are proliferating rapidly. These include spatial input devices such as trackers, 3-D pointing devices, and whole-hand devices allowing gestural input. Three-dimensional, multisensory output technologies--such as stereoscopic projection displays, head-mounted displays (HMDs), spatial audio systems, and haptic devices--are also becoming more common. In this chapter we present a brief overview of 3-D interaction and user interfaces technologies for VE.

Computer Systems↗
PubMed2003

Internet-based telehealth system for the treatment of agoraphobia.

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.

Agoraphobia↗
PubMed2002

Virtual reality treatment of flying phobia.

Flying phobia (FP) might become a very incapacitating and disturbing problem in a person's social, working, and private areas. Psychological interventions based on exposure therapy have proved to be effective, but given the particular nature of this disorder they bear important limitations. Exposure therapy for FP might be excessively costly in terms of time, money, and efforts. Virtual reality (VR) overcomes these difficulties as different significant environments might be created, where the patient can interact with what he or she fears while in a totally safe and protected environment-the therapist's consulting room. This paper intends, on one hand, to show the different scenarios designed by our team for the VR treatment of FP, and on the other, to present the first results supporting the effectiveness of this new tool for the treatment of FP in a multiple baseline study.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Virtual food in virtual environments for the treatment of eating disorders.

Eating disorders (Eds) are one of the problems with higher social repercussion in the last years. Sometimes, these clinical syndromes, which are characterized by an altered eating behavior, can have dramatic consequences. In eating disorders, one of the more critical situations, in addition to other of equal or more importance, is the patient's confrontation with food: the visual confrontation, the eating process and the repercussion on his weight. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been used in psychology, as a therapeutic help tool for the treatment of different psychological problems, for several years now. Their helpfulness is increasingly being recognized. Some developed virtual environments (VE) and their corresponding published studies endorse the efficiency of this tool. Nevertheless, in order to increase the possibilities of success, it is very important to obtain a complete patient immersion in the VE: visual, auditory and interactive. Sometimes there are processes or actions of reality, which are difficult to simulate virtually, and simulating them coarsely would result in the patient lack of immersion in the VE, thus seriously decreasing the possibilities of success. The eating process is an example, since it consists of several steps, some of which (biting, chewing, etc.) don't have an evident virtual solution. This article shows how food and eating process have been simulated virtually in the development of a virtual environment for the treatment of eating disorders.

Adaptation, Psychological↗