Digital Therapeutics

A therapeutic application in the form of a video game

The prevalence of overweight and obesity has been increasing exponentially for years, placing an immense human and financial cost on our societies. Overweight is the result of overconsumption of unhealthy foods. 

This project proposes to incorporate a major new scientific discovery into a fully operational digital therapeutic application for research, medical and educational purposes.

The clinical neuroscience research group at the Medical Section of the University and Hospital of Fribourg has recently discovered a new way to modify the brain circuits that determine what individuals like and want. They have identified cognitive tasks whose repeated practice induces highly targeted brain plasticity in the reward regions of the brain, resulting in a progressive reduction in the attractiveness of target foods. 

Strong scientific evidence indicates that ten minutes of gaming per day over a month using our intervention induces a 20% sustainable reduction in appetite for and consumption of unhealthy foods in 95% of the participants. The novel human-machine interface that governs these interactions between the individual and target images is being patented internationally.