PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Med.
Sec. Family Medicine and Primary Care
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1610259
This article is part of the Research TopicDigital Health Innovations for Patient-Centered CareView all 25 articles
Biophilic Design, Neuroarchitecture and Therapeutic Home Environments: Harnessing Medicinal Properties of Intentionally-Designed Spaces to Enhance Digital Health Outcomes
Provisionally accepted
- 1The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
- 2Click Therapeutics, Inc., New York, New York, United States
- 3Dayhouse Studio, Salt Lake City, United States
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Digital health technologies (DHT) support patient-centered care by delivering behavioral, educational, self-efficacy and self-management interventions. Yet, multifactorial chronic diseases are shaped by complex interactions between genetics, environment and behavior, embodied in social and commercial determinants of health. Given that people in the United States spend on average 18 hours per day at home, the impact of home environment on a person's health is underutilized in medicine. Herein, we discuss opportunities to improve therapy outcomes through bridging digital interventions with intentionally-designed restorative and multisensory environments that simultaneously foster physiological and emotional homeostasis. Harnessing positive effects of biophilic design, neuroarchitecture and therapeutic home environments can enhance the effectiveness of digital interventions, including digital therapeutics (DTx), wearables and drug + digital combination therapies that utilize "prescription drug use-related software" (PDURS) framework. Real-world barriers to advance these solutions include a lack of public awareness about connections between the built environment, health and well-being, the knowledge gap in long-term clinical outcomes of biophilic interventions, and a limited funding for advancing "biophilic design as an adjunctive therapy" applications. In conclusion, creating digital health ecosystems that favor symbiosis between digital health interventions and enriched environments can promote sustained behavior change, elevate precision care and improve value-based healthcare outcomes.
Keywords: prescription digital therapeutics, Mobile medical app, virtual reality, built environment, household, Housing, salutogenic, biophilia
Received: 11 Apr 2025; Accepted: 20 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bulaj, Forero and Huntsman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Grzegorz Bulaj, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.