Rationale and Development of a Proof of Concept Gamified mHealth Attention Training App Towards Healthy Food Cues
Rationale and Development of a Proof of Concept Gamified mHealth Attention Training App Towards Healthy Food Cues

Summary/Abstract: Attentional biases toward food cues have been found to play an important role in the maintenance of maladaptive eating behaviors, such as emotional eating, overeating or eating in the absence of hunger. As such, attention training, otherwise known as attentional bias modification, has traditionally focused on retraining attention away from food towards neutral stimuli. However, recent theoretical upgrades and empirical findings highlight that maladaptive eating habits are not only associated with biases towards food in general, but particularly to biases towards unhealthy, calorie-dense foods. More specifically, individuals showing maladaptive eating patterns have a higher tendency to automatically turn their attention towards unhealthy food cues in their environment and to perceive them as being more salient. Thus, a more theoretically sound and ecologically valid aim of attentional bias modification interventions is to retrain attention away from unhealthy food cues towards healthier food stimuli. However, only a handful of interventions and applications are built on the distinction between healthy and unhealthy food items and neither one of them is portable or interactive. The current study presents the theoretical rationale and the development of SANATENT, a gamified mHealth attentional bias modification intervention, designed to curb unhealthy eating habits and promote the consumption of healthy food following a five-day retraining of attentional biases from unhealthy food items to healthy food cues. Developed for Android operating smartphones, SANATENT is envisioned to alter users’ attentional biases in their ecological environment, thus being suited to be used as a stand-alone intervention or as a therapeutic adjuvant. Moreover, the application is based on gamification principles of learning, making it more appealing to use for younger individuals and potentially facilitating adherence to treatment. Practical and theoretical implications, as well as directions for future studies will be discussed.

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