Want to find out more about our Mindset-XR Innovation Support Programme?
Sign up to our monthly newsletter and keep up to date with all the latest news
Click here
Mindset-XR Innovation Support Programme company spotlight: Cineon
May 7, 2025Our Mindset-XR Innovation Support Programme spotlight for May is on Cineon. Cineon is developing iSAVE, a project designed to support patients who experience anxiety when receiving medical treatment by using virtual exposure to enhance service access. In this blog, we hear from Cineon Founder, Toby de Burgh, who shares insights about the company and its innovative approach to enhancing patients' well-being.
What three pieces of advice would you give budding innovators?
Innovation in healthcare is difficult, and collaboration is key. Take every opportunity to network and build the links with partners that are crucial for success.
Get good advice and understand the potentially complex regulatory environment that your innovation will need to operate in. Route to market in the NHS can require comprehensive clinical trials, but evidence can be gained from service evaluations and other less onerous techniques that can make the journey easier.
- Don’t lose heart - the opportunities for immersive tech are huge, as is their potential to overcome some of the most challenging health problems facing society. It’s an exciting time for innovators, and to see your innovation have a positive impact on a person is extremely rewarding.
What’s the most exciting statistic or fact you have about XR in mental health?
Our technology is powered by a proprietary Emotion AI system called our Empathic Learning Engine (ELE), which can detect and respond to user anxiety. With Mindset funding, we applied it to the problem of patients failing to attend clinical procedures due to anxiety.
We are now focusing on absenteeism due to occupational stress. This is a massive problem that, aside from the hugely impacting health aspects, costs the UK economy billions of pounds annually due to lost productivity, and this cost continues to rise. In 2023, the UK economy lost £32.7 billion in productivity due to work absences.
How has user feedback, particularly from patients and clinicians, shaped your product?
Our iSAVE product was co-designed with input from clinicians, imaging specialists, and young adults helping us address practical challenges like headset comfort, patient anxiety triggers, and clinician workflow.
Feedback from radiographers helped us simplify the setup for real clinical environments, while input from anxious patients guided how we pace and personalise exposure levels during therapy.
Across all our projects, we involve the full stakeholder community early - not just to test usability, but to challenge our assumptions about what "support" actually looks like.
How could your innovation tackle inequalities in mental health?
- Enhanced accessibility: iSAVE's VR-based exposure therapy can be deployed remotely, reaching individuals in underserved or rural areas who might otherwise lack access to specialised mental health services.Cultural sensitivity: By tailoring XR scenarios to reflect diverse cultural contexts, we can provide more relatable and effective therapy for patients from various backgrounds.
- Reducing stigma: Offering a private, technology-driven therapeutic option can encourage individuals who are hesitant to seek traditional therapy due to stigma to engage with mental health support.
Why should the health and care system be excited about your innovation?
Our tech isn’t just about novelty — it’s about solving very real, very expensive problems like missed appointments, poor scan quality, and care access inequalities. iSAVE and similar tools offer the NHS a scalable, evidence-based way to reduce healthcare anxiety and improve service delivery without adding burden to overstretched staff.
What makes Cineon’s innovation different is the intelligent layer underneath — an AI engine that adapts in real time to each patient’s emotional response, so the tech responds like a good therapist would. We believe that using our ELE Emotion AI, which can sense and respond to user anxiety, for different anxiety-related mental health issues will lead to new applications that can help ease the service delays patients experience in many places.
What type of support are you seeking most from readers to help drive your project forward?
Clinical partnerships, commercial collaborations and early-adopters both in the UK and beyond: We're keen to collaborate with healthcare providers and NHS Trusts to pilot iSAVE and our upcoming ELE-Stress product in real-world settings. This is to ensure its effectiveness across diverse patient populations. Our stress adaptive Emotion AI ‘ELE’ is being developed as an API that can be utilised by others who are developing therapeutic applications, and we are keen to work with collaborators to implement and test ELE in their applications.
Funding opportunities: Securing additional funding will enable us to expand our research, refine our technology, and accelerate the integration of iSAVE into standard care pathways.
Policy advocacy: Support from policymakers and stakeholders can help establish frameworks for the adoption of XR technologies in mental health care, promoting wider accessibility.
