Interoceptive Technologies for Psychiatric Interventions: From Diagnosis to Clinical Applications

Interoception—the perception of internal bodily signals—has recently emerged as an area of significant interest due to its potential implications in emotion and the prevalence of dysfunctional interoceptive processes across psychopathological conditions. Despite the importance of interoception in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, its experimental manipulation remains technically challenging. This is due to the invasive nature of existing methods, the limitation of self-report and unimodal measures of interoception, and the absence of standardized approaches across disparate fields. This article integrates diverse research efforts from psychology, physiology, psychiatry, and engineering to address this oversight. The aim is to provide a detailed cross-disciplinary overview, suggesting a consistent terminology for multidisciplinary research into interoceptive processes, their underlying mechanisms, and potential implications. Following a general introduction to the neurophysiology of interoception as hierarchical predictive processing, we review the existing paradigms for manipulating interoception the laboratory (e.g., interoceptive modulation), their underlying mechanisms (e.g., interoceptive conditioning), and clinical applications (e.g., interoceptive exposure). We suggest a general classification for interoceptive technologies reflecting interoception as a hierarchical system of bodily information processing, and discuss their potential for diagnosing and treating mental health disorders. Despite promising results, considerable work is still needed to develop standardized, validated measures of interoceptive function across domains and before these technologies can translate safely and effectively to clinical settings.