New Mobile Game Aims To Ease Symptoms Of Anxiety, Depression

An Israeli startup has developed a mobile game that uses neuroscience-based techniques to treat symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Hedonia uses a therapeutic method grounded in the research of Dr. Moshe Bar, the former director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Harvard Medical School, to treat the mood disorders. 

The therapy, called Facilitating Thought Progression (FTP), is designed to disrupt negative thought patterns, lack of motivation, and the inability to experience happiness. It does so through simple exercises that broaden patients’ thought patterns to be more associative, and help them to think more quickly, which research has found can improve a person’s mood. 

Hedonia’s new game, Mood Bloom, utilizes these exercises by using word chains, associations, speed reading, and even sky-gazing to expand thinking and make thoughts travel more rapidly.

In the game, these exercises come into play as players gather resources to build villages populated with human and animal characters.

The startup says that Mood Bloom is only effective if users play it for four days a week for eight weeks or longer. 

“As game designers, we usually measure our success in numbers of players and how much money a game generates,” said Ohad Barzilay, head of product development at Hedonia.

“With Mood Bloom, our focus shifts to evaluating how many people with depression and anxiety who play our game, start feeling better,” he said.

“We strive to give people a game that they enjoy and, more importantly, make it so captivating that they want to make playing the game a long-term habit.”