This project has been shortlisted for the DPH 2025 Innovation Prize – Best Partnership
Team: Brian Li Han Wong, Sanya Rajpal and Pawan Rajpal (AdagioVR)
Outline: In India, over 150 million people live with unmet mental health needs, with the vast majority unable to access traditional services due to stigma, language barriers, cost, and infrastructure gaps. Severe mental illness (SMI) remains largely excluded from digital innovation efforts that focus on symptom tracking or teletherapy for urban, affluent populations.
AdagioVR, a digital mental health start-up, is redefining this landscape by delivering immersive, non-verbal VR therapy designed for trauma, anxiety, and behavioural health conditions. What sets this innovation apart is its co-development and implementation through a broad-based partnership ecosystem, including:
- Local community organisations (e.g. MITR Trust, Nipun Foundation) for grassroots outreach, pilot delivery, and user testing with sex workers, migrant workers, and LGBTQIA+ populations
- Government health providers and clinics, providing space and legitimacy to integrate digital mental health into informal care ecosystems
- Academic and clinical institutions such as the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences (IHBAS), for scientific validation and ethical oversight
- Strategic funders and VC partners, enabling high-risk, equity-oriented innovation in a low-return sector often overlooked by traditional investors
Our model centres the voices of marginalised users in the design and refinement of the technology. VR therapy sessions are deployed in familiar, safe environments – like sewing centres and community tea rooms – ensuring cultural and contextual relevance. Community health workers are trained to facilitate these sessions, bridging the gap between formal psychiatry and lived experience.
Through this partnership model, AdagioVR is demonstrating how mutual benefit can be achieved:
- For local communities: safe, trauma-informed digital therapy options
- For government and public health systems: scalable, cost-effective innovation that relieves pressure on under-resourced psychiatric infrastructure
- For innovators and funders: validated, real-world use cases that demonstrate impact in some of the most underserved mental health markets globally
We hosted a session on “The Next Frontier of Digital Mental Health: Innovating for Equity at the Margins” during the recent World Health Summit Regional Meeting in Delhi. With strong momentum, we will be showcasing this work at the forthcoming Geneva Digital Health Day during the 2025 World Health Assembly in May and the World Health Summit in Berlin in October.
