Delivered across health, education and culture

Supporting executive function in adults with ADHD

Adults with ADHD face long waits for assessment and limited support for the executive function difficulties that affect daily life: attention regulation, task initiation, and cognitive overload.

FreedomXR is our clinician-led XR intervention designed to support attention and executive function in adults with ADHD. Developed with Innovate UK funding under the Mindset programme, it has been shaped by structured co-design and user acceptance testing with 22 adults with ADHD, followed by acceptance testing with a further 14 adults with ADHD.

The findings challenged conventional UX thinking. Participants told us that standard gamification and engagement patterns increased cognitive load instead of reducing it, and that feedback reshaped our entire interaction model.

FreedomXR has a working prototype, documented design principles, and a staged evidence pathway. It is now seeking NHS pilot partners, and was recently featured in the Health Innovation Network's Mindset-XR programme spotlight.

From September 2026, FreedomXR is the industry use case for a six-month research project funded through SPRITE+, an EPSRC-funded research network, and led by the University of Greenwich with community partner Home-Start Greenwich. The project examines trust, safety and privacy in XR digital health adoption, and builds the ethics and evidence infrastructure needed to adapt FreedomXR for neurodivergent young people.

AR storytelling for young people who struggle to tell their own stories

Telling your own story is harder than it sounds. Personal narrative demands sequencing, self-reflection and verbal confidence all at once, which is a lot to ask of any young person and more so for neurodivergent children.

Through the Augment the City SBRI competition, funded by Belfast Region City Deal with Belfast City Council as contracting body and Digital Catapult providing technical advice, we developed Perspectives, an augmented reality storytelling system that helps children and young people capture and tell their personal stories for the Belfast Stories collection.

Designed for all young people but with a deliberate focus on neurodivergent children, who are underserved by traditional storytelling approaches, Perspectives scaffolds narrative visually, letting young people build and share their stories in ways that don't depend on writing fluency or verbal confidence. We delivered phases one and two of the competition.

Helping young people with epilepsy understand their condition

Around 60,000 children and young people under 18 live with epilepsy in the UK. Most will need to explain it, at some point, to friends and classmates who have never seen a seizure.

Immerse is a phone-based augmented reality app developed under SBRI Healthcare (funded by NHS England), contracted through Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and delivered in collaboration with Young Epilepsy.

The app takes a holistic approach to living with epilepsy: helping young people understand what happens during a seizure, show friends what it might look like and what to do, and prepare for unfamiliar experiences such as an MRI scan. By making the condition more visible and explainable, Immerse was designed to help young people understand their condition and communicate it more confidently to others.

Location-based AR for a global entertainment brand

Cartoon Network and Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon GO, wanted to explore how location-based augmented reality could extend Toon Cup, Cartoon Network's popular football game, into the real world.

Selected for the accelerator's concept development phase, run by Digital Catapult with Warner Media and Niantic, we designed Toon Cup Explorers and built a working AR prototype using Cartoon Network assets and Niantic's Lightship platform. Players discover portals into Cartoon Network worlds around them, glimpsing characters and environments from shows like Teen Titans Go! and The Amazing World of Gumball through doorways in real space.

Our concept and demos were presented at the Niantic Lightship Showcase in London, and following this work Digital Catapult named Neurotech one of the UK's eight immersive studios to watch.

Visualising IBS to help patients understand their condition

Irritable bowel syndrome is common but invisible. Patients often struggle to understand what is happening inside their own bodies, which feeds anxiety and makes symptoms harder to manage.

Gutwise is an augmented reality app that shows people with IBS what is happening inside their body, visualising the gut, how symptoms arise, and what goes on during a flare-up.

Delivered as a Phase 1 project under the SBRI Psychological Therapies programme, working with NHS Golden Jubilee and NHS Grampian, Gutwise explored how AR visualisation could support patient understanding and self-management in a condition with a strong gut–brain component.

Accessible careers exploration for neurodivergent students

Careers information is dense, text-heavy and overwhelming. For neurodivergent young people making decisions about their future, that is a real barrier.

See4Myself is a two-part careers advice platform combining a tablet app and VR headset experience, developed through a project with the Department for the Economy Northern Ireland and co-designed with neurodivergent students and careers advisors.

The platform presents careers information visually and in bite-sized chunks, deliberately structured to prevent cognitive overload. Beyond job information, it offers practical guidance that careers services rarely provide: the workplace adjustments a young person can reasonably ask for, and the changes to their environment that could help them thrive.

Available to all students, See4Myself is designed so that the adaptations made for neurodivergent users can also make the information clearer and more engaging for a wider range of students.

Immersive comprehension and communication for autistic learners

Plenty of autistic children aged 10 to 16 can read the words on the page but not follow the story. Standard classroom approaches often give them no way in.

Talkback VR is an immersive comprehension and communication platform co-designed with neurodivergent schoolchildren, teachers and educational psychologists, developed over three years with SBRI funding through the Education Authority Northern Ireland. Its ten interactive literacy lessons use VR storytelling environments to give visual grounding to literature, helping pupils engage with and understand texts.

Teachers using Talkback reported something we hadn't designed for: pupils who had become dysregulated used the headset to settle and reacclimatise to the classroom. That observation is now a formal research question. Talkback is deployed in schools and under evaluation with University College London and the University of Salford, with the Salford study examining its role in classroom regulation as well as literacy.

A new generation of Talkback is currently in development.