Alessandra Preziosa

Therapeutic applications of the mobile phone

ABSTRACT As the availability of new communication technologies increases, mental health professionals have incorporated these innovations into their practice and research. Up to now several studies have presented promising results in using the power and convenience of the Internet for clinical care. While multiple contributions focus on the potential and the advantages of therapies delivered through the Internet, mental health practitioners may take into account new technological opportunities to improve their practice. Mobile phone diffusion is expanding worldwide at breath-taking speed. In fewer than 20 years, mobile phones have gone from being rare and expensive pieces of equipment used primarily by the business elite, to a pervasive low-cost personal item. In many countries, mobile phones now outnumber land-line telephones, with most adults and many children now owning mobile phones. With high levels of mobile telephone penetration, a mobile culture has evolved, where the phone becomes a key social and cultural tool. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potentialities that mobile phones may offer in clinical care. The paper will investigate in which areas of clinical interventions mobile phones have already been successfully applied. Moreover, the paper will discuss these opportunities by presenting the results of two different studies based on the use of the mobile phone for anxiety management.

Can Relaxation Training Reduce Emotional Eating in Women with Obesity? An Exploratory Study with 3 Months of Follow-Up

Stress and negative emotions have been shown to be critical factors in inducing overeating as a form of maladaptive coping in some patients with obesity. We evaluated the efficacy of a 3-week relaxation protocol enhanced by virtual reality and portable mp3 players in reducing emotional eating in a sample of 60 female inpatients with obesity who report emotional eating, using a three-arm exploratory randomized controlled trial with 3 months of follow-up. The intervention included 12 individual relaxation training sessions provided traditionally (imagination condition) or supported by virtual reality (virtual reality condition). Control participants received only standard hospital-based care. Weight, behavior and psychological data were collected and analyzed. Relaxation training was effective in reducing emotional eating episodes, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and in improving perceived self-efficacy for eating control at 3-month follow-up after discharge. The virtual reality condition proved better than the imagination condition in the reduction of emotional eating. Weight decreased in subjects in all three conditions without significant differences between them, probably due to the common treatment all inpatients received. We conclude that relaxation training supported by new technologies could be a useful tool for reducing emotional eating episodes and thereby reducing weight and obesity.

A Free, Open-Source Virtual Reality Platform for the Rehabilitation of Cognitive and Psychological Disorders

The adoption of Virtual Reality in rehabilitation of cognitive and psychological disorders is limited by high costs of software development, lack of technical expertise among end-users, and the difficulty of adapting the contents of the virtual environments (VEs). In this paper, we describe NeuroVR, (http://www.neurovr.org), a cost-free virtual reality platform based on open-source software components that allows non-expert users to easily customize a VE by using a set of pre-designed virtual scenes, and to run them in an immersive or non-immersive modality. In this paper, we provide a description of the key functional features of the platform.

An open-source virtual reality platform for clinical and research applications

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in clinical and research applications of virtual reality (VR). However, the adoption of this approach is still limited by the high costs of software development, lack of technical expertise among end-users, and the difficulty of adapting the contents of the virtual environments (VEs). To address these needs, we have designed and developed NeuroVR, (http://www.neurovr.org), a cost-free virtual reality platform based on open-source software components. NeuroVR allows nonexpert users to easily customize a VE by using a set of pre-designed virtual scenes, and to run them in an immersive or non-immersive modality. In this paper, we provide a description of the key functional features of the platform.