A Novel Technique for Improving Bodily Experience in a Non-operable Super–Super Obesity Case

Abstract

Introduction: The available clinical guidelines for super-super obese patients (i.e., with body mass index (BMI) > 60 kg/m2) that are not suitable for bariatric surgery mandate a palliative multidisciplinary treatment (i.e., production and maintenance of weight loss) provided in a center of excellence. However, the modality and the impact of this approach are still controversial. Moreover, it is not able to address the high level of body dissatisfaction and body distortions that are common among these patients.Clinical Presentation: We report the case of a non-operable super–super obesity – a 37 year old woman with a BMI of 62 kg/m2 – receiving a specialized treatment for her obstructive sleep apnea. She entered a multidisciplinary program that promoted healthy behaviors, including physical activities and psychological intervention. To improve body dissatisfaction, which was linked to a significant multisensory impairment of body perception, she also entered a virtual reality (VR) body-swapping illusion protocol. At the end of the current investigation, the patient continued her multidisciplinary program, reporting an increase in the motivation for undertaking healthy behavior and a decrease in the anxiety feelings associated with her clinical condition.Conclusion: This case provides preliminary evidence that both body dissatisfaction and body-size distortions of non-operable super-super obesity patients could be addressed by a VR body-swapping protocol, which is important because the palliative multidisciplinary treatment recommended for these patients is not able to address them. Interestingly, the use of a VR body-swapping illusion protocol seems to be able to improve not only the experience of the body in these patients but their motivation for change, too.

Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study

“…In other words, VR could be considered as a sort of natural generator of need for accommodation. It is noted that VR itself could be considered as a source of paradoxical, unusual experiences (e.g., Friedman et al, 2014 ; Gaggioli, 2016 ; Gaggioli et al, 2016 ; Pallavicini et al, 2016 ; Serino et al, 2016 ) this would open to a broad array of possibilities regarding the creation of VR scenarios for eliciting complex emotions in the lab. First, these findings indicated that it is possible to induce vastness and the need accommodation components of awe differentially.…”

Transforming Experience: The Potential of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for Enhancing Personal and Clinical Change

“…In other words, as in the movie Being John Malkovich , using VR, individuals can experience the perspective of another individual by seeing what the other see, hearing what the other hear, and touching what the other touch ( 155 , 156 ). In a recent attempt of applying this method, Serino and colleagues ( 157 ) successfully used the illusion of body ownership over a body different to current one (a virtual body with a skinny belly) with a non-operable extreme obese patient (e.g., body mass index >60 kg/m 2 ). Their data show that, after body swapping, the patient reduced the levels of body dissatisfaction and body distortion.…”

Altered Processing and Integration of Multisensory Bodily Representations and Signals in Eating Disorders: A Possible Path Toward the Understanding of Their Underlying Causes

“…The appearance of new technologies and in particular the broader availability of virtual reality—a technology that has been already used successfully both to study body schema representations and distortions in normal and clinical population (Riva, 1998 ; Ferrer-García and Gutiérrez-Maldonado, 2010 ; Preston and Ehrsson, 2014 , 2016 ; Mölbert et al, 2017 ), and in the treatment of EDs (Gutiérrez-Maldonado et al, 2016 , 2017 ; Riva, 2017a )—offers new ways to provide crossmodal associations (Riva et al, 2017b ; Tajadura-Jiménez et al, 2017 ; Weser et al, 2017 ) that can be used in clinical practice (Dakanalis et al, 2017b ; Serino and Dakanalis, 2017 ). For example, different recent studies using virtual reality (VR)-based body swapping—a novel technology-based crossmodal association between vision (a new virtual reality [VR] body) and touch (the real body)—provided preliminary support to this approach, allowing a significant improvement in the ability to correctly estimate body size in both nonclinical (Preston and Ehrsson, 2014 ; Ferrer-Garcia et al, 2017 ) and clinical samples (Keizer et al, 2016 ; Serino et al, 2016a , b ).…”