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Virtual reality based evaluation of mental disorders

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VRMIND (Virtual reality based evaluation of mental disorders)

Reporting period: 2015-06-01 to 2015-11-30

Mental disorders and neurological conditions affect to at least 20% of worldwide population during lifetime. NESPLORA has developed VRMIND, a new ICT system for the evaluation of a range of mental disorders, based on the use of virtual reality (VR) environments. This technology is characterised by the ability to develop, clinically validate and perform innovative diagnosis procedures that simply cannot be done up to now. The patient, wearing virtual reality glasses and headphones, is introduced in different virtual environments specifically designed to diagnose a family of mental disorders. These virtual environments put the patient through multiple expected and unexpected stimuli, propose to execute different actions and ask to respond different questions. At the same time the system monitors the reactions of the patient and registers multiple variables. This technology reaches a 93,5% accuracy, a 95,2% sensitivity and a 91,9% specify, wide over the 75% accuracy offered by the conventional testing methods and other computerized tests not including a VR component. This high accuracy comes from the high ecologic validity that VRMIND has demonstrated in the clinical studies held up to now. Furthermore, the testing capacities of VRMIND allow not only the extremely accurate diagnose of mental conditions but also is able to determine the intensity of the mental conditions, a capacity that conventional tests cannot develop due to limitations in their capacity to gather and correlate enough data. This measuring capacity allows the practitioner to design the specific treatment needed by each patient instead of prescribing a standard treatment to all patients above condition thresholds either they are in the borderline or they are an extreme case.
The overall objective of this project is the demonstration, clinically and in the market, of the higher performance of virtual reality environment based diagnosis systems for mental disorders. This will be mainly done through the execution of the clinical studies and the development of normative studies for the homologation of VRMIND in front of the medical and practitioner collectives of Europe, USA and Latin America.
In this action we’ve deeply analysed the business opportunity for VRMIND and we have elaborated a comprehensive business plan regarding the current and foresighted features of the market and our capacities in NESPLORA. The main conclusions of the action are:
• We’ve performed a Marketing Analysis studying:
o Customers: there’s a clear need of innovation and improvement in the test business. The market is very large mainly focused in Europe, NAFTA and LATAM. Private practitioners are the most interesting market segment for the initial market deployment despite private is larger.
o Company: we have the required skills and capacities. Current products target a small part of the market but ICSTEST, DIMEMO and DLCDETECT gives us access to the bulk of the target market.
o Competitors: contingent companies and products are strong but lack of capacity to imitate our product, a numerous collective new players are targeting the same market but their products are clearly underperforming
o Collaborators: distribution is at the same a competitor, but are at the same time interested in distributing VRMIND. The involvement of prescribers, both for market push and pull strategies is our main collaboration need.
o Context: the context is favourable to VRMIND due to the increasing awareness of society on mental disorders and to the tech trends, being going mobile and virtual the bid of main global tech firms.
• These finding has allowed us to know better the needs, motivations and potential resistances from customers and end users. We’ve defined the consequent business model and customer value proposition and the communication strategy to overcome resistances, foster the demand and materialise sales. No burdens have been identified in the Freedom to Operate study.
• In the economic study we’ve analysed the financial dimension of the business considering both the SMEI project and the foreseeable heritage of the company after the completion of the action. The profitability opportunity is large and clear and the loss risk is relatively low.
• Finally, we’ve designed the clinical validation and market demonstrator that will make all this possible.
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