Q&A with Matt Omernick: Reimagining the Patient Experience with Akili on Roblox

The below represents the opinions of an individual, and does not suggest any off-label use of EndeavorRx ® .

EndeavorRx is FDA-authorized for treatment in kids 8-12 with inattentive or combined-type attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) targeting inattention. EndeavorRx is marketed as the first-of-its-kind ADHD add-on treatment for kids 8-12 to improve attention, delivered through an immersive video game experience on iPhone ® , iPad ® and Android™ devices.

—

At the core of everything Akili does is a single, foundational idea: create experiences so captivating that patients want to take their medicine - and have fun doing it. Part of this means finding ways for medicine to fit seamlessly into the lives of patients, engaging them in the spaces where they live and play.

That’s why, earlier this year, Akili announced a first-of-its-kind pilot program with Roblox, a global platform bringing millions of people together through shared experiences. This partnership represents a major step toward realizing our long-term vision of integrating digital medicine into patients’ daily lives in ways never before seen or experienced.

To learn more about this collaboration – and how Akili is adapting proven game design strategies to create meaningful and clinically-validated therapies – we sat down with Matt Omernick, Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer at Akili:

Matt, you had a long career in the traditional, big-budget video game industry – what drew you to working in digital therapeutics and how has that previous experience informed your work?

Well, I knew pretty early on that I wanted to do something in games – as a kid, I got into computer graphics and animation because it was this new and unexplored space for artistic expression where the rules hadn’t been written yet. That led me to the entertainment industry. I worked on films and TV shows, eventually settling into game development where I worked on and led projects with large studios making mass-market video games. It was an incredible experience, but I always felt that these interactive experiences could be so much more.

My other passion was learning about the brain. I was always fascinated by the brain and the fact that we don’t know nearly as much about how it works as we do the rest of the body. And these two passions began to merge – neuroscientists were looking at how games affect the brain, including some of the games I’ve worked on – and some of those effects were positive: better visual processing, improved reaction time and peripheral vision, for instance.

So that led me, and a handful of others who would go on to be my co-founders here at Akili, to start asking if we could create medicine delivered through a video game, building it from the ground up with the intention of improving cognitive skills and helping people living with cognitive deficiencies.

Why are games such a potent delivery mechanism for digital therapeutics?

One of the things that neuroscience has made clear is that our brains are changed by experiences. We see the most extreme and negative versions of this phenomenon in something like PTSD, but there are more subtle versions of this as well. For instance, think about how sometimes a certain smell can instantly bring you back to a previous experience, not just a memory but the mental state you were in.

Video games are unique as a form of media because they are interactive experiences. I love movies, TV and books, but they are passive experiences. Nothing happens in a video game without the player making a choice or responding to stimuli – and that’s how real-life experiences work too, so our brain responds similarly.

If you look at clinical behavioral psychology, a lot of the work in that space is about tapping into the relationship between motivation and rewards. The entire field of cognitive behavioral therapy is based on the premise that you can change unhealthy mental patterns by helping individuals recognize those patterns and their motivations, learning to divert them in a way that makes their lives better. Good game design is asking a lot of questions in that same space: how can we incentivize a player to make a challenging decision, learn a skill or repeat a loop while keeping them engaged?

With our first product, EndeavorRx ® , we’ve seen that we can take the learnings of game design and the learnings of cognitive science and blend them in a uniquely powerful way that can be tailored to each patient to fit their needs. We can get people to do the work to build the mental muscles they need to tackle cognitive challenges. This is a massive change from the traditional ways of treating these conditions, and we’re only scratching the surface.

Let’s talk about the Roblox partnership. This is the first time Akili is collaborating with an immersive 3D platform, so what will this mean for EndeavorRx patients?

Digital therapeutics are only effective if they’re used, and that means we need to encourage engagement. EndeavorRx is prescribed for an age group (8-12) which represents just under 50% of theRoblox audience. It’s a cultural touchstone for that generation in the way that popular video games in the 90s were for mine.

With this pilot partnership, a select, random group of patients will access exclusive Roblox virtual items exchange tied to in-game progress within Akili’s EndeavorRx treatment. It’s meaningful to patients, incorporates an experience they’re already familiar with and enjoy and provides a visual reminder of the work they’re putting in when they use EndeavorRx.

It’s amazing to think of the groundbreaking capabilities this type of partnership could lead to in the long term.

Roblox is hugely popular, but there were other reasons this partnership made sense for Akili?

I think Roblox shares a lot of the same vision that we have for the role of games and play in daily life. Roblox is as much a creativity platform as a games universe. As a kid who taught himself to do computer graphics in the 80s and early 90s, I would have devoured something like this because it nurtures that sort of curiosity.

The plain fact is that kids today are digital natives – that’s why something like EndeavorRx is appealing to kids and their parents; it meets patients on their home turf. And being connected to the Roblox ecosystem is just an extension of that philosophy.