New technologies for providing remote psychological treatments

Abstract

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.