Home Health Care INVEST Pitch Perfect winner spotlight: Atentiv’s digital therapeutic for ADHD isn’t just...

INVEST Pitch Perfect winner spotlight: Atentiv’s digital therapeutic for ADHD isn’t just fun and games

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A screenshot shows one of the levels of Skylar’s Run, a digital therapeutic developed by Atentiv to improve attention in kids with ADHD.

In one level of Skylar’s Run, players control a character moving through a jungle on a distant planet, collecting blue crystals along the way.

There’s a twist: The game isn’t controlled by pressing buttons, but using an EEG headset. To control the main character’s speed as he runs through the world, the player must concentrate — which is the point.

Skylar’s Run is intended to help kids with ADHD improve their attention and with impulse inhibition. It isn’t FDA cleared, but has been tested in eight studies with a total of 337 participants.

“Almost every child asks for a sequel,” said Eric Gordon, founder and CEO of Atentiv, who has been working on this for more than eight years.

Gordon first got the idea after seeing his own children go through ADHD. He noticed they were learning these skills from each other, such as how to focus and ignore distractions.

“It was perplexing to talk to psychiatrists and pediatricians, because their response was medication,” he said. “I could see one child teaching the other child by setting examples.”

Gordon described this in a conversation with Ragna Krishnan, who was Duke’s chairman of psychiatry at the time. He happened to be studying the use of a game to improve ADHD in elderly patients. Gordon licensed the technology from Duke and ran Atentiv’s first funded study at two ADHD centers in Boston in 2012.

Of course, there was still the work of developing the game. Gordon turned to a game developer to make an eight-hour adventure story setting where players are whisked away to another planet to save a threatened civilization.

The idea is that the player must watch objects out in the distance while managing what’s in front of them. It was designed for children between ages 8 and 12, and gameplay is divided into 25-minute sessions.

A small study published in Nature Translational Psychiatry in 2018 showed that kids that used the system for eight weeks saw a “significantly greater reduction” in clinical attention scores compared to the control group. This was measured using the ADHD rating scale. However, after removing poor quality data due to excessive motion, the study had a small sample size of just 29 participants.

Last year, Atentiv struck a 10-year deployment agreement with the Children’s Specialized Hospital’s Center for Discovery, Innovation and Development, part of RJWBarnabas Health System in New Jersey. Gordon says he is planning for a full launch of Skylar’s Run next year, starting in New Jersey.

Atentiv is also making the digital therapeutic available to kids in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, after the Food and Drug Administration temporarily waived restrictions around software tools for mental health to improve access during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This will likely continue for some time,” Gordon said. “In the interim, we’re collecting real world evidence data in demonstrating this is an effective therapeutic based on the gold-standard measures that the FDA requires.”

Though the idea of games as medicine is quite new, the FDA is starting to develop a framework. After a long wait through the FDA’s de novo process, another startup, Akili Interactive, gained FDA clearance for its video game therapeutic for children with ADHD.

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