The Interactive Media Institute (IMI) is a 501c3 non-profit organization working to further the application of advanced technologies for patient care. IMI sponsors national and international workshops, meetings, and continuing education courses. The Institute is also active in conducting research and clinical trials, and specializes in virtual reality, telehealth, videogame virtual reality, and human-computer interaction research. IMI is actively working with world leaders who are experts in utilizing virtual reality, multimedia, computer-generated avatars, personal robots and other technologies to treat patients with both mental and physical disorders.
IMI promotes education for healthcare providers, students, interns, and other trainees in the healthcare field. In addition, researchers at the Institute collaborate with experts in technical areas such as computer hardware, software, and graphics; biomedical engineering; communication engineering; and others. It also serves as a source of information, training, and assistance for professionals. IMI s educational programs seek to offer assistance to those individuals who would benefit from virtual reality and multimedia technical solutions and encourages businesses to develop expanded multimedia solutions to assist a larger segment of the general public in solving a broader range of issues through the use of advanced technologies.
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VEPSY UPDATED PROJECT*
Many of us grew up with the naive assumption that couches are the best used therapeutic tools in psychotherapy. But tools for psychotherapy are evolving in a much more complex environment than a designer's made chaise longue. In particular virtual reality (VR) devices have the potential for appearing soon in many consulting rooms. The use of Virtual Reality in medicine it is not a novelty. Applications of Virtual Environments for health care have been developed in the following areas: surgical procedures (remote surgery or telepresence, augmented or enhanced surgery, and planning and simulation of procedures before surgery); preventive medicine and patient education; medical education and training; visualization of massive medical databases; and architectural design for health-care facilities. However, there is a growing recognition that VR can play an important role in clinical psychology, too.
To exploit and understand this potential is the main goal of the " Telemedicine and Portable Virtual Environment in Clinical Psychology -VEPSY UPDATED " an European Community funded research project (IST-2000-25323, http://www.psicologia.net). More in detail, the project provides both innovative tools - Telemedicine and Portable tools - for the treatment of patients, clinical trials to verify their viability and action plans for dissemination of its results to an Extended Audience - potential users and influential groups.
The project has also developed different PC based virtual reality modules to be used in clinical assessment and treatment. In particular the developed modules address the following pathologies: anxiety disorders; male impotence and premature ejaculation; obesity, bulimia and binge-eating disorders.
For more info about the research activities of the European Union please check the LearnIST web site or the CORDIS web site.
The conference is also supported by the following organizations:
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DSO
Institute for Interventional Informatics
Istituto Auxologico Italiano
MindTel LLC
National Institute on Drug Abuse
Naval Research Lab
The Virtual Reality Medical Center
* The VEPSY UPDATED project is co-financed by the DG INFSO Information Society Technologies programme: http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka1/health/home.html.
However, the conference, its contents and the associated web site do not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.
