DIGITAL VACCINES

What is a Digital Vaccine? 

Digital vaccines are new developments in the field of digital therapeutics that amalgamates medicine with technology to tackle chronic and lifestyle ailments. Digital therapeutics aim to deliver medical care through the use of smartphones, tablets and other interactive devices, by effecting behavioral changes in users. Digital vaccines may be applications on smartphones or immersive virtual reality experiences that help immunize against certain target diseases by inculcating habits and practices that prevent the risk of users becoming susceptible to such illnesses in the future. Digital vaccines provide safe, low risk management of chronic diseases that require constant medical intervention, by use of gamified and virtual reality platforms.

Even though the word vaccine conjures up frightening images of being poked with needles, digital vaccines are non-invasive, cognitive behavioral therapy based applications that seek to ensure that users can immunize themselves against diseases through practicing good habits. Digital vaccines nudge human behavior through neurocognitive training. To put it in the clearest terms, it is a very sophisticated and advanced version of the Pavlovian dog technique.

For those unfamiliar with the term “Pavlovian dog technique”, it refers to the experiment conducted by Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov to understand classical conditioning, wherein he would ring a bell and serve food to a dog, which would cause the dog to salivate. As days passed, the dog came to associate the ringing of the bell with the serving of food and eventually there came a time when mere ringing of the bell, even in the absence of food, would cause the dog to salivate.

Digital vaccines work on a similar principle, and seek to sow the seeds of good habits and practices on an involuntary and subconscious level so that they become reflexive and almost second nature to users.

How Digital Vaccines work

A digital vaccine stimulates the body at a cellular level; for instance influencing children to make smart food choices. This helps to lower the risk of a wide range of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and cancer, as well as cognitive diseases such as ADHD and dementia. In fact, digital vaccines can also be used to immunize against recent infectious diseases such as Covid-19. If a kid is influenced to abstain from fast foods such as colas and burgers, and choose healthy food such as fruits instead, it would control the sugar levels, the sodium levels as well as the saturated fat levels in the body of children and effectively immunize against lifestyle and chronic diseases. Similarly, if the habit of dutifully washing hands is inculcated in children, it would help wash away germs and viruses that they may have picked up from contact surfaces.

With the advent of Web 3.0 technologies, wearable technologies and virtual reality platforms, the development and proliferation of digital vaccines promises to address medical conditions through constant behavioral modifications, and at much lower medical expenses.

Fooya – the first patented digital vaccine

Fooya, the first patented digital vaccine, was developed by Bhargav Sri Prakash and his team at FriendsLearn, which a bio and health technology startup established in 2013 and is based out of Chennai and San Francisco. The digital vaccine has been developed by Bhargav Sri Prakash and his team in collaboration with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Stanford School of Medicine, University of Michigan, Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital UPMC, Kansas Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine and the National University of Singapore.

Fooya is a mobile phone application where the user, a child, has a superhero avatar inside the game who is fighting junk food that an evil scientist is developing, and shooting at her/ him in the form of lasers. Every time the child feels tired, she/ he powers up with water and local, traditional foods. In the world of Fooya, packaged and processed food is the enemy, and the mad robots have been designed inspired from vending and soda machines. Depending on the actions of the users in the game, their abilities, shapes, skills and health parameters like vision and speed are altered. This subliminally implants ideas of which foods are good and which are harmful, without being told outright. Children learn about good dietary habits through their own experiences. A child, who avoids aerated drinks while playing Fooya, would be inclined to decline aerated drinks in the real world as well. Children, who used Fooya for 20 to 30 minutes per day, were seen to be making significantly healthier food choices immediately.

Bhargav Sri Prakash, himself a fitness enthusiast all his life, came up with the idea of Fooya when he saw his daughter being influenced by advertisements from processing food companies and how that weakened her health. He came to a realization that modern medicine would not always be effective in finding complete cures for diseases and the more suitable way out was prevention.

Besides being operational on a smartphone, Fooya can also be played in a virtual reality environment. Presently children from schools in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi have been using the vaccine application.

Some details about the patent

The patent for the digital vaccine was granted to Bhargav Sri Prakash by the US Patent Office. The US patent having Patent No. US 11,322,235B2, and granted on May 3, 2022 discloses a digital vaccine system and a computer implemented method of providing a digital vaccine system.

The digital vaccine system comprises an environment running on one or more hardware processors.  The disclosed digital vaccine platform enables and facilitates interaction with virtual objects (VOBs) in a digital realm, for instance an augmented reality environment, an alternate reality environment, a mixed reality environment or a virtual reality environment. The human interactions or engagements with VOBs in or via the disclosed environment can be integrated with the real world environment and real world contexts to bring utility to everyday lives. The disclosed digital vaccine platform includes a virtual world that exists in another dimensionsuperimposed on the physical world. This virtual world is accessed via a user interface of client application.

The technology relates to using artificial intelligence type computers and digital data processing systems and corresponding data processing methods using artificial neural networks for analyzing data.

Corresponding patent applications have also been filed by Bhargav Sri Prakash in other jurisdictions, and the applications are currently pending in countries like Europe, Canada, Australia, China, and India.

Other digital vaccines being developed

Fooya is the not only digital vaccine presently out there. It may be the only one that has received a patent, but being part of the developing field of digital therapeutics, several digital vaccines are being developed; like Sleepio developed by San Francisco based digital health company named Big Health that is used for treatment of insomnia and has been shown to improve both insomnia symptoms and mental well-being; reSET created by Pear Therapeutics in partnership with Sandoz, a division of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, to treat substance abuse disorder; and MSK developed by Kaia Health to treat musculoskeletal pain. Pear Therapeutics also has plans to collaborate with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to develop Somryst, a treatment for insomnia and depression.

Advantages of digital vaccines: 

The burgeoning field of digital vaccines has several benefits and an attempt has been made to encapsulate them in the following paragraphs.

Cheaper healthcare

Digital vaccines are mostly disbursed through free or nominally priced paid apps on smartphones and virtual reality devices. Since these applications are more focused on effecting preventive measures, they are much less expensive than the medicines required to be taken as daily dosages to control and combat incurable lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.

Amendment and innovation in patent laws

In order to accommodate patenting of digital vaccines which have both software and hardware components, such as AI and VR headsets, as integral parts, there needs to be modification of patents laws to accommodate such projects and allow their patentability. This has the potential to change the intellectual property law landscape for the better and will open up avenues for development of many other technologies that have both critical and technically advanced software and hardware components resulting in a tangible technical effect.

Digital vaccines will have longer effect

Considering that digital vaccines are developed as preventive measures and focus on cognitive behavioral therapy, thereby fundamentally altering behavioral patterns of users, they will have longer effects since users conditioned against diseases would be less likely fall back on destructive habits and take actions that would compromise their immunity. On the other hand, ordinary vaccines have limited efficacy and require frequent and multiple doses to provide immunity from diseases.

Treatment of incurable lifestyle diseases

Modern medical science has not yet been able to come up with medicines to completely cure lifestyle diseases, leading to those afflicted incurring a continuous medical expense for management of such diseases. By aiming to do away with lifestyle diseases from an early stage, digital vaccines can effectively prevent them.

Can be effective tools for treatment of mental health conditions and PTSD

The United States’ Department of Defense’ National Center for Telehealth and Technology has created a Virtual PTSD Experience computer-based program called ‘Second Life’ where military personnel can create virtual avatars to navigate through realistic scenarios that address their mental health concerns. Moreover, several digital health companies are developing vaccines for treatment of insomnia and depression, as set out in previous paragraphs.

Will push consumers towards adoption of Web 3.0 and a decentralised internet

Considering that immersive virtual reality experiences would form a large part of digital vaccines, it would lead to a push for adoption of Web 3.0 by users around the world; the Web 3.0 will have a strong emphasis on decentralized applications and make extensive use of blockchain based technologies. Who knows, it may even lead to the development of a decentralized internet where traffic is not dictated or influenced by corporations, user data is not harvested for profit, protection of user privacy is given utmost importance and information is truly free in every sense of the world.

Application of NFT technology to protect user data

Considering that the science of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) is quite solid, the technology can be used to protect user data and authenticate purchases when it comes to accessing and using digital vaccines. For instance, to use a slightly tangential example, at present with every pair of shoes it sells, Nike provided buyers with an NFT that authenticates the product that has been purchased.

Challenges to Digital vaccines 

Despite the promises that digital vaccines offer, there are certain challenges to the full fledged adoption and proliferation of these alternate medicine methods.

Pushback from pharmaceuticals lobby and fast food lobby  

The pharmaceutical industries involved in the production of medicines that treat and manage lifestyle diseases, and fast food lobbies are two segments that majorly profit from a continuing unbalance and bad food habits of people. There will bound to be some pushback from them that will affect the widespread adoption of digital vaccines as a viable, alternate healthcare mechanism.

Protecting data of users, especially in sensitive matters like mental health conditions

It will become critical to protect the data of users in general, and especially those afflicted with mental health conditions as they are easy to manipulate. So digital health companies who are collecting such data in order to optimize their platform and make it better, need to heavily invest in cyber security to protect user data and prevent such data from being stolen and misused.

Protecting privacy of children where vaccines are made for kids

In case of vaccines targeted for use by children, like Fooya, it will become critical for companies to protect the privacy of children and ensure that their applications adhere to all laws in every jurisdiction that ensure online privacy protection of children. Companies should not be allowed to simply shirk responsibilities for privacy violation by claiming that their terms of service cover necessary provisions of applicable laws, and should be actively held accountable for any lapses.

Governmental regulation that might obstruct and delay innovation

Considering the large amount of data that will flow through digital vaccine applications, governments may wish to have oversight and scrutiny of such applications. This can lead to delay in obtaining necessary licenses and permissions for such applications to operate. Autocratic regimes may even want to build backdoors into applications to keep tabs on citizens using them. Such roadblocks imposed by governments may delay and sometimes even obstruct innovation.

Concerns regarding conditioning of children

Beyond everything set out above, there is always the ethical question that by being introduced to digital vaccines which may fundamentally modify their behavior, are children being manipulated into behaving in certain pre-decided manners as determined by adults. It can be argued that by introducing children to digital vaccines, they are not being allowed to live the childhood they may wish to live, that they are not being allowed to have free will to make choices and have the experiences that are essential to being kids.

Conclusion

Digital vaccines represent a new frontier of healthcare and bring in its wake several innovations and exciting possibilities. By providing opportunities and funding for development of digital vaccines, and in turn digital therapeutics, there is a strong possibility of innovators being able to treat and prevent chronic and lifestyle diseases as well as mental health disorders, where modern medicine has not shown significant efficacy. With the proliferation of digital vaccines, management of diseases may not remain the only feasible option.

Soumik Chakraborty

Having worked in capital market with one of the leading Corporate Law firms in India for a while, Soumik decided to switch and pursue a career in IP laws about 6 years back. He is currently a part of the trademarks where he advises clients in areas of fast moving consumer goods, food and beverages, healthcare, clothing and footwear, among others. He is also involved in trademark oppositions and rectification proceedings and also design cancellation actions. Additionally, he assists the litigation team on various matters relating to trademarks and designs.

Rohini Datta

Practicing as a patent agent for over 8 years, she handles several patent drafting and prosecution of inventions related to biotechnology, chemical and allied inventions. She is also involved in patent oppositions, patentability & non- infringement opinions relating to API & pharmaceutical compositions. She has also been responsible for filings under the PVP law.

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