Pre-therapeutic Validation of the Virtual Reality-based Exposure Scenario for CBT "ReVBED" for the Induction of Food Craving in Patients With Bulimia and Binge Eating Disorder (BED)

Food craving is a major therapeutic issue in Eating Disorders with binge eating: the Bulimia Nervosa and the Binge Eating Disorder (BED). Food craving is linked to compulsive eating and its apprehension is currently based on classic Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies (CBT). However, it remains difficult to induce in therapy and a significant number of patients do not respond to classic CBTs. The development of exposure scenarios for CBT in virtual reality (VR) has allowed a gain in efficacy and in particular therapeutic effects lasting longer after treatment. Nevertheless, the stimuli used are often simple food visuals and insufficiently consider the many factors influencing food craving (physical, psychological, socio-environmental...) and VR immersion is still limited by the use of 3D laptops (fixed) rather than wireless headsets.

Eating Disorders-specialized clinicians from Saint-Etienne University Hospital Center (CHU) and VR-specialized engineers from National School of Engineering of Saint-Etienne (ENISE) therefore collaborated in the creation of ReVBED, a VR-based exposure scenario for CBT for the induction of food craving in eating disorders with binge eating. ReVBED offers successive exposures to multimodal stimuli in a coherent scenario and in an immersive virtual environment via a wireless VR headset. Our first objective is to validate the effectiveness of our scenario in inducing food craving in patients with bulimia and BED.