Action-Centered Exposure Therapy Using a Serious Game to Help Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorder

Alcohol use disorder is a worldwide issue causing distress and harm all over societies. The rate of relapse and dropout alcohol addiction treatment shows the necessity to improve those treatments. It is often caused by a lack of motivation or boredom. Cue exposure therapy is an effective treatment that tries to prevent relapses, but it has too many flaws preventing a global inhibition of the addiction. Virtual reality exposure therapy improves cue exposure therapy by using a virtual environment, that way the treatment is less situation-dependent by controlling a virtual world and its context. Serious games are used to address problems that we can find in more classical ways of learning such as motivation and boredom. It also allows the patient to have more active participation. This new approach aims to combine virtual reality exposure therapy, and action-centered exposure therapy, with a serious game to avoid dropout and have better self-commitment from patients. This paper provides key elements to propose a new approach to help tackle AUD. A prototype, to give an example of the implementation, a serious game is also presented.