morungos

Conventional anxiety-reducing therapies generally require patients to be re-exposed to the source of anxiety and increase the risk of re-sensitisation; a requirement which poses legal, practical and ethical issues in treating e.g. driving phobia and travel anxiety. Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) represents an exciting opportunity to re-expose patients to realistic driving scenarios in a controlled, safe and interactive environment using computer graphics and various sensory stimuli to offer a sense of presence but achieve sufficient emotional arousal to afford major therapeutic potential. Although VRT of driving phobia has shown promise, no effort has been made to identify and test the multiple technological parameters which affect patients' experience of presence and emotion in a virtual world and how these relate to therapeutic effectiveness. To date most research on the application of VRT has used 'laboratory based approaches', i.e. where one patient at a time is provided with treatment. The paper reports the development of a novel VRT system that delivers VRT to patients in their homes through the innovative application of Web technology which to date has been thought unreliable for such applications. Benefits of the new system are the: (i) delivery of evidence-based treatment in the community to multiple users whilst retaining individually tailored therapy programmes under the control and supervision of a therapist; (ii) avoidance of re-traumatisation; (iii) increase of treatment compliance and confidentiality, and (iv) systematic evaluation of treatment components. Various implications of such a system are discussed.