Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine 2014: Positive Change: Connecting the Virtual and the Real (Studies in Health Technology and Informatics)

The evolution of healthcare delivery systems has included an increased reliance on technology. There has been a significant shift in the nature of care prevention, diagnosis and treatment, which has decreased the importance of traditional methods of care delivery. Cybertherapy has started to make progress in treating a variety of disorders, but more work is needed in a number of areas, including the development of easy-to-use and more affordable hardware and software and objective measurement tools, the need to address potential side-effects, and the implementation of more controlled studies to evaluate cybertherapy in comparison to traditional therapies. This book, the 2014 Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine (ARCTT), presents a carefully structured overview of subjects related to the area of cybertherapy and telemedicine. The book is divided into six sections. An introductory editorial explains the focus of this year's issue, and is followed by a section entitled Critical Reviews, which summarises and examines emerging cybertherapy topics. The third section includes chapters on Evaluation Studies, and the contributions in section four, Original Research, deal with new cybertherapy methods and approaches. The fifth section, Clinical Observations, includes case studies and research protocols with long-term potential, and the final sixth section presents papers describing future research work. The book will be of interest to both health professionals and patients, and to anyone else interested in the continued improvement of healthcare systems.