Chimp app could cut alcohol addiction

Computer games and smart phone apps could be prescribed to NHS patients to help them tackle conditions such as alcohol addiction.

Computer games and smartphone apps could be used to treat people for alcohol addiction

Certain games, such as ChimpShop, incorporate psychological insights that have been gathered from experiments carried out at Bangor University in Wales.

The aim of the “inexpensive” app is to deter heavy drinkers away from their alcoholic beverage through observations made at the university on how the brain responds to external stimuli, reported the Financial Times.

Miles Cox, a professor at Bangor University, has conducted research to better understand how addictive behaviour is fuelled by visual images or signs related to the condition.

He discovered that people suffering from alcohol abuse will take marginally more time looking and understanding images of wine bottles or beer cans in comparison to when they see images of non-alcoholic products.

Cox noted the brief increase in attention creates a subconscious desire to drink alcohol.

In ChimpShop, players are required to run down supermarket aisles while chimps throw products at them and catch as many items as they can.

For people with alcohol addictions, their subconscious will push them to focus too closely on alcoholic products being thrown, thus lowering their scores.

In order to move forwards in the game, players must switch their focus to healthier products being thrown and as a result will retrain their brain to forget their subconscious tendencies towards alcohol.

Chris Hillier, co-founder and research manager at Attention Retraining Technologies, a company out of Bangor University to create behavioural changing games, said: “We calculated that, as a spell in a detoxification clinic costs about £10,000 a head, the game would only have to divert 20 people away from needing this expensive intervention and the NHS would be in the black.”

The game is available to download to smartphones for 69p or 99p for Apple and Android devices respectively, but will be mainly distributed through doctors’ surgeries.

Doctors who would like a patient to consider reducing their alcohol intake will be given a code to download the app for free.