Lumino

Right now, one in five people are experiencing a mental health problem. Most will have not have access to effective treatment.

In the developing world, the challenge is even more acute. The World Health Organisation estimates that 45 per cent of the world's population live in a country where there is less than one psychiatrist to serve 100,000 people.

Our goal is to reinvent how mental health treatment is delivered, through developing truly scalable, world-leading digital therapeutic programmes. We combine a strong focus on clinical outcomes with great design.

Our programmes make Cognitive Behavioural Therapy available to everyone, through multi-week programmes. Scaling this approach globally could improve the mental health of millions of people, regardless of local constraints relating to existing healthcare resources.

Lumino is supported by the Oxford Academic Health Science Network, the Eastern Academic Health Science Network, Innovate UK and Cambridge University's Social Ventures Incubator.

During the pandemic, the mental health impacts of disease outbreaks have been brought into sharp focus.

The global challenge is clear. 792 million people are experiencing a mental health problem. Even in developed countries, such as the UK, 2 in 3 of those people will not have access to treatment. In other parts of the world, the problem is often much more acute.

Traditional models of services often involve delivering therapy in 1 to 1 settings. Simply put, this does not scale. Digital technology provides us with the opportunity to bridge the treatment gap, particularly for those experiencing mild to moderate issues. 

Lumino hopes to make affordable, evidence-based treatment available to everyone, so millions across the world can enjoy better mental health.

Lumino develops multi-week programmes targeted at specific groups of patients, available online and via smartphones, based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

Developed by clinical psychologists, programmes are based on clinical evidence of what works for patients presenting with common issues causing them difficulty.

We combine this rigour with a creative approach to programme development, creating interventions which are highly engaging and enjoyable to use.

Our primary focus is to expand access to evidence-based mental health treatment for those who currently face significant challenges doing so.

Those challenges include:

• Costs of accessing traditional services being too high.
• A lack of available services locally.
• Long waiting lists.
• A preference for alternatives to traditional services. This includes not wanting to engage in face to face treatment and valuing the convenience of online options.

We have ambitions to scale globally, and develop solutions that make a difference addressing health inequalities in developed and developing countries.

Our first product is targeting women in menopause. 60 per cent of women in the US with significant menopausal symptoms seek medical attention, but nearly 3 in 4 women are left untreated. Women around the world have been traditionally underseved by healthcare in this area. We also know CBT, when developed specifically to support women going through menopause and perimenopause, has a great evidence base for improving quality of life and wellbeing.

In developing our solutions we are interviewing women in depth, from a wide variety of communities, about their experiences and difficulties. Using those insights, we build programme content and continue to iterate upon that based on their feedback. As we expand into other countries, we are mindful of ensuring content is culturally appropriate and will be working with women in those territories to develop the right programme for them.

Lumino's mission closely aligns with the challenge. 3.5 million people around the world, so far, have lost their lives to Covid-19. Families have had their lives touched by tragedy.

Countless more have lost employment or have faced isolation from loved ones. Many people will have had face-to-face mental health treatment disrupted - ironically, when demand for help has risen.

We have to learn lessons for future outbreaks. Digital technology can allow us to scale evidence based treatment for depression and other conditions quickly, and do so in circumstances where delivering face-to-face care is challenging. That's what Lumino can do.

With the financial support of Innovate UK, we have developed a prototype of our first product (detailed earlier). We are currently testing this with a small group of Beta testers, and going through rounds of iteration and further testing, before we have an MVP to make available publically. 

In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), we have an established treatment for mental health problems with a great evidence base.

However, traditionally CBT is delivered 1-to-1 in a clinic setting. Whilst this personal approach can have huge benefits, it is not easily scalable. It relies heavily on the availability of a highly trained workforce and as a result is expensive to deliver. In many countries around the world, accessing talking therapy in this way is usually the preserve of the wealthy.

There are examples of where CBT has translated well into a digital form. These digital therapeutics, as we call them, have a huge potential for revolutionising access to evidence-based treatment and support. We must ensure we apply rigour to evaluating these digital interventions through clinical trials.

So far, the digital therapeutic solutions we have seen come to market have not targeted the paticularly underserved groups we want to focus on.

For individuals and healthcare systems - the need is clear. In the context of future disease outbreaks, such tools have the potential to be real game changers. Through digital therapeutics we can make mental health support available to millions of people even when healthcare systems are subject to significant disruption and high demand.

Lumino's work could act as a genuine catalyst. We want to demonstrate to others in the space how digital therapeutics can tackle inequalities in terms of access and outcomes to mental health treatment and support. 

We are currently working with 10 women as part of our development phase of the project. Next year, we plan to start our programme of clinical evaluation in conjunction with our partners in the UK's NHS. Exact details on this are to be confirmed, but we expect this to be upward of 100 women.

Once we have established the final iteration of the programme, and this has been successful in clinical evaluations, we will open up the programme to women across the UK. We aim to serve over 10,000 women in this country, Our next step after this will be to launch the programme in overseas territories - hopefully to many thousands more women. 

We plan on measuring our progress against a number of KPIs. These include:

• Clinical outcomes.
• Net promotor score.
• New signups.
• Active users.
• Inbound website visitors and traffic.
• Impressions and impressions share.

We are working with our Incubator at Cambridge University to further develop our approach to measuring impact.

Lumino currently has two full-time members of staff. Becky Cotton is our Founder and CEO, and Mo Morgan is our Director of Product Strategy.

Our wider project team consists of 5 freelance contractors.

Becky Cotton, Founder and CEO

Mental health policy expert, with 15 years experience. Latterly, Director of Mental Health Policy for the NHS Confederation. Co-founded and chaired the Mental Health Policy Group.

Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and of the Royal Society of Arts.  Graduate of the University of Cambridge Executive MBA. Received Director's Award and Sainsbury's Scholarship.

Mo Morgan, Product Strategy Director

Accomplished strategist and technologist. Broad expertise in experience and brand strategy.

At global agencies including McCann, led teams on clients including Apple, Dyson , Weight Watchers and Amnesty International.

Passionate about mental health, living with bipolar disorder and epilepsy. Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Broader team

Our team, made up of 5 additional freelance consultants, brings together a broad range of skills. We have a clinical psychologist, branding specialist, graphic designer, illustrator and medical writer.

Lived experience and co-production

Everyone involved in Lumino brings a great deal of professional expertise to our mission. We believe passionately in the value of lived experience and in co-production.

Many of us involved in Lumino have personal experience of living with mental health problems, including caring for others. We have a female founder, and are gender balanced throughout the team. To deliver on this mission, we must reflect the communities we aim to serve. 

Lumino is driven by a social mission - to make life healthier and happier for millions of people. As we grow beyond our founding duo, we want to ensure we build a team that reflects the diversity of the communities we were established to serve.

Equality, diversity and inclusion are embedded in our organisational strategy. We want to make sure that our products are designed to be as inclusive and accessible to a diverse range of users, and to build a team which is recognised as a supportive employer of choice, attracting and retaining diverse talent and with EDI embedded in all that we do.

In our first year, this included ensuring - as part of our research programme - we speak to as diverse a range of women as possible. This included speaking to women of different sexual orientation, races, religions and with disabilities. We are working hard to ensure accessibility considerations are built into our product roadmap and that we build as inclusive an innovation as possible.

In future years, this will include building out our team to ensure we represent the diversity of our communities. We will monitor this, as well as usage / outcome data for different users of our programmes. We will use this data to continuously improve our work, and therefore outcomes for our users. 

We are hugely excited by the prospect of joining the Solve community.

The barriers we face are all ones which Solve is ideally placed to help us overcome.

In terms of raising investment, Solve would allow us the opportunity to access opportunities to secure grants and equity finance.

In terms of our international ambitions, Solve would allow us the opportunity to widen our networks, access experts from outside of our home country (the UK), and the space to properly think through how we can ensure our products can be made appropriate for different cultures, communities and regulatory regimes.

We hope to have the opportunity to join this community of like-minded peers, and making a contribution to the Solve community.

Financial Support

• We would benefit from assistance accessing sources of investment, particularly from sources which align with our passion for social impact.
• Understanding the investment landscape in the US would be helpful.

Legal and Regulatory

• As a health-tech start up, we have a good understanding of regulations as they apply in the UK and EU.
• Accessing expect advice and mentorship from those based in the US, with an understanding of the FDA system, would be incredibly helpful.

Product Distribution

• Similarly, we would value input in planning expansion of our service into other countries, including the USA.

Technology

• We would very much value the opportunity to connect with researchers at MIT who are interested in exploring how big data and machine learning techniques might support the future development of our digital therapeutic programmes. 

We greatly value working with people and organisations who share our mission and values.

In terms of the MIT community, we would love to connect with academics who are interested in the application of techniques such as machine learning to improving mental health. For example, the Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard and MIT has done some fascinating recent research into this area using textual analysis with online postings, to better spot people who may be experiencing mental health problems. This has interesting implications for how, for example, online mental health services think about safety and support their users. We would also greatly appreciate the ability to link with those at the MIT Media Lab researching how to engage people in creative learning experiences (the Lifelong Kindergarten project).

There are also Solve members working on similar missions who we may be able to support - and vice versa. StrongMinds, for example, in New York are exploring how to treat depression at scale in Africa.

Beyond this, we would greatly value opportunities to build relationships with US research institutions with whom we might collaborate on clinical investigations as we build the evidence base for digital therapeutic approaches. Many of those organisations (Harvard Medical School for example) are based in the Boston area.

At the same time, we are keen to support others from the MIT and Solve community to deliver on their missions and may have useful networks and perspectives from the UK to share.

The founding mission of Lumino is to make a difference in the lives of millions of people, who otherwise might not be able to access evidence-based treatment easily.

In the US, we know around 8 per cent of the population remains uninsured. Barriers to accessing healthcare are a reality for millions of people. Whilst the issues around this are complex, part of the solution must be to leverage digital technology to make treatment easier, and cheaper, to access. With our first product, aimed at women going through menopause, that is exactly what we're doing.

We have huge respect for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the fantastic work that they do. The USA is a country we love, and have big ambitions to bring our work across the Atlantic. Being selected for the PRize would not just be a great honour, but a wonderful opportunity to build bridges to the United States and explore opportunities to tackle health inequalities together.

We would be honoured to be considered for the Innovation for Women Prize.

We want to make an impact on the inequalities experienced by women and girls globally. We want our products to provide genuinely scalable solutions to inequalities experienced by women and girls in terms of access to, and outcomes from healthcare.

As a female-founded start-up, we also want to champion female talent in the sector and provide opportunities for women, particularly those from traditionally underestimated backgrounds, to develop careers in the sector.

Our first product in development is aimed at tackling a major gap in healthcare provision experienced by women around the world - the menopause.

We know that 60 per cent of women going through this transition will experience problematic symptoms, including hot flushes and night sweats. But 3 in 4 women are left untreated. It is hard to imagine another health condition that impacts 50 per cent of the population, where access to evidence based treatment options, recommended by respected medical organisations, is so poor.

We want to change that, and make a real difference to the lives of women around the world. Being selected for the Innovation for Women Prize would be a tremendous honour, and make a real difference in terms of helping us realise that vision.