A specially developed virtual reality application allows you to see people with anorexia of different weights. This can reduce their fear of gaining weight and help them overcome the disease.
 
During four 30-minute sessions, 24 patients being treated for anorexia nervosa were able to use the app to see what their physical appearance would be like if they were at a healthy weight. This triggered a great deal of tension in many people, which developed in different ways: almost half felt a high level of tension at first, but this soon subsided. The third was initially only a slightly restless sight, which then increased. Others did not find the sight of the altered body images uncomfortable at all. The app was developed by a research team from the University Hospital in Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
 
Some patients felt anxious, but after four sessions it seemed to get better. "Interestingly, almost all of the patients reported that they found the virtual presentation very useful for their personal recovery," said Dr. Simone Behrens, who published the results with the team in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
 
The virtual application is deliberately designed to be portable and ready to use in minutes. The team created digital body models from several thousand body scans, which can be individually adapted depending on the patient's height and weight. Care has been taken to accurately reproduce the natural proportions to make the image as realistic as possible.

Quellen: DOI 10.1159/000530932 und youtube https://youtu.be/zJTvkctl3Js