Virtual Reality Emerges As a New Tool to Fight Drug Addiction, and This University-Based Startup Is Going All-In

A team of researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine has found that virtual reality can be a powerful weapon in battling addiction—and have launched RelateXR, a startup business around the idea of ​​helping addicts build a “therapeutic alliance with the self” by envisioning their future with and without drugs.

RelateXR uses virtual reality to help recovering addicts envision the outcome of their present behavior, or an alternative in which they

“There is a large body of evidence that shows people with addictions have difficulty connecting with their personal futures,” says founder Brandon Oberlin, Ph.D, an assistant professor in the departments of psychology and neurology at Indiana University School of Medicine. “Behavioral economics shows that people with addictions value their future much less than people without them.”

Offering what the founders call “remedial imagination training,” RelateXR creates custom avatars based on photos of individual users—with cloned versions of their voices—to allow them to travel 15 years into the future and find reasons to value it more. Once they put their headset on, they can meet two possible future selves—one in recovery, and one still using drugs.

“We all have an infinite number of possible futures,” explains Oberlin.

The team has raised nearly $5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to support their patent-pending invention. Currently it is in clinical trial. It had been tested on about 71 users, including controls, when I spoke with the team in July.

Many health professionals are looking for new ways to help the many Americans who are addicted to opioids and other drugs. More than 96,000 people now die of drug overdoses annually, according to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics. Opioids have been connected to 7 out of 10 overdose deaths, the Center says. “There is a huge need for this,” says Oberlin. “The scale of the problem is huge. The death toll is especially jarring.”

As the public becomes more educated about the dangers of opioids, there has been some improvement, although slight, in the situation. The Centers for Disease Control found that drug overdose deaths decreased slightly from 111,029 in 2022 to 107,543 in 2023, with a decrease in opioid-related deaths driving the trend. However, deaths from other types of drugs, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, increased.

Users of the RelateXR app can envision their life if they were to quit using drugs, with all of the daily choices that entails, or continued using them. If they opt to “quit” virtually, they get to see a future with new activities replacing the drugs with—such as rebuilding a relationship with a spouse, raising a family or going back to school.

“The idea we have is to connect people with their future self by making it real,” Oberlin says. “If it’s vivid, realistic and feels authentic, that creates positive, pro-social decision-making, which is lacking in addiction. We took this idea and ran with it.”

Oberlin has 20 years of experience in addictions research. The other founding team members are Andrew Nelson—who runs technology for RelateXR and owns gaming startup Half Full Nelson—and undergraduate Izzy Branham, who runs RelateXR’s business development and previously co-founded Fia Technologies, a talent acquisition platform that leveraged machine learning. The university’s tech transfer office connected Branham with the RelateXR team.

To develop the app, the founders worked with people in early recovery—from 2 weeks to eleven-and-a-half months clean and sober. In a randomized controlled trial, they found that addicts using the app experienced an increase in self-efficacy—a predictor of success in recovery—within 30 days.

The realistic nature of the avatars is one reason the app is so effective, notes Nelson. “It makes a huge difference to have a natural speaking version of you that sounds like you,” he says.

The founders aim to offer RelateXR in a price range comparable to medication assisted therapy (MAT), considered by some experts to be the gold standard in treating opioid use disorder. The founders view RelateXR as an adjunct to MAT, 12-step programs and other approaches to treatment.

Relate XR has been talking with the FDA about getting the app cleared as a medical device. “Our goal would be primarily to roll it out to treatment centers and individual therapists’ offices,” Oberlin says.

Many treatment facilities have a reason to stay open to new advances. Addicts often lose faith in treatment centers. Interviewed on local TV, one recovering crack addict who lived on the streets of Minneapolis for a time said that though he didn’t trust anyone—cops, counselors or probation officers—he liked it that the app only requires him to trust himself: “ “That’s the only one I’ll listen to,” he said.