TEO: an online emotional therapy system to apply homework assignments in the Treatment of adjustment disorders

Abstract

Adjustment Disorders (AD) are a very important public health problem. Regarding its treatment, only a series of general guidelines are available. Our research team has developed a cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) supported by Virtual Reality (VR) that has shown its utility in the treatment of AD. A CBT approach gives a crucial role to homework assignments. So far, studies that use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for psychological treatments have been centered on how to use the technologies to deliver treatment within the therapeuti c c ontext. No study is avai lable in the literature that uses ICT to apply homework assignments. Therefore, in the present work we pretend to go one step beyond and join the use of the VR EMMA system within the therapy sessions, with the use of other ICT to apply homework assignments between sessions in the treatment of AD. TEO is a completely open Online Emotional Therapy system based on Web technology that allows, in a simple and effective way, to create personalized therapeutic material to present to the patient over the Internet. The aim of the present work is to describe the TEO system and the study that is being conducted to test its efficacy and efficiency.