Lumi Nova - Industry Partnership with BfB Labs Ltd: Immersive Digital Therapeutic Game for Anxiety in Children and Young People

Unmet need

Mild to moderate anxiety disorders are a growing and impairing mental health difficulty in children, but while effective treatments exist, only a small minority of children gain access to specialist support, and existing interventions do not include exposure therapy as a core component of treatment.

Project Concept

BfB labs were seeking support to understand the landscape of developing, positioning and testing a new mobile app for implementation in National Health Service (NHS) and education sectors.

The app they developed, Lumi Nova, is an immersive, augmented reality digital mobile game, used for the treatment of anxiety in children aged 7-12 years.

Once the app had been developed, it needed to be evaluated independently to assess its effectiveness, user engagement, user experience and safety, ahead of further refinement and implementation. 

MindTech Role

• MindTech helped BfB Labs to build collaborations with academia, NHS and education sectors.
• MindTech provided guidance and training on market access and commercialisation around the healthcare landscape. This included regulation, care pathways, health economics and implementation science.
• MindTech assisted BfB Labs in securing Research & Development (R&D) funding.
• MindTech evaluated anonymised data from a small scale pilot study, using pre and post study measures and automatically collected data from 8 weeks of game play. Outcome measures captured effectiveness in reducing anxiety symptoms and functional impairment, meeting child-identified goal-based outcomes, user engagement with the app, and safety.

Funded by

• NHS England Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI)
• Innovate UK’s Digital Health Technology Catalyst
• NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (East of England)

Impact

Lumi Nova is now available for free to children and young people in more than 16 areas across the UK through the NHS, social organisations and voluntary sector frontline providers. Schools and healthcare services now have access to a regulated product which can be offered to young people who are on a waiting list, or who do not meet the criteria for referral to CAMHS.

Project recognition

MindTech’s involvement was pivotal in Lumi Nova obtaining unprecedented medical device regulation approval for a digital therapeutic in paediatric anxiety for 7-12 year olds and led to a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) early value recommendation for Lumi Nova as a self-help digital technology tool for anxiety or low mood in children.

What’s next?

An implementation study is currently underway in the East of England.

BfB Labs will continue to explore opportunities for new products, using immersive technology such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR).

Project partners

• BfB Labs
• University of Reading
• Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust
• NIHR HealthTech Research Centre Mental Health (MindTech)

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