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Bergson

About us

We see what health systems miss.
Then we help you act on it.

Umio exists because health and care innovation has a perception problem. And twenty years of work have produced something that addresses it at the root.

Who we are

Umio is a health innovation company based in Oxford. We work with enterprises, health systems, and innovators who are ready to begin from real lived experience - the actual texture of life with a condition - rather than from clinical abstractions, demographic categories, or system-defined outcomes.

We are not a conventional consultancy. The work we do is grounded in a body of original research, philosophy, and practice that has been developing since 2007 - and that has produced three things no other organisation in health innovation has built together: a proprietary framework for perceiving real lived experience, an AI platform that operationalises that framework at scale, and a proven innovation methodology that translates lived experience perception into commercially defensible strategy and growth.

That combination - the intellectual depth, the practical tools, and the commercial track record - is what makes Umio genuinely different.

What we have built

We tailor our entire set of methods to a particular context and purpose

The Intellectual Foundation

Umio's work is built on nearly two decades of original thinking about a single question: why do health systems keep missing what matters most to the people they serve?

The answer Chris Lawer arrived at - through research across Europe, the US, and beyond, and through direct engagement with hundreds of patients, clinicians, and health system leaders - is that the problem is not structural. It is perceptual. Health systems cannot see what they were never built to look for.

That insight produced the Health Ecosystem Value Design framework, published in 2021 and endorsed by leading health innovation thinkers including Professor Neal Halfon at UCLA and Professor Venkat Ramaswamy at the University of Michigan. It established a completely different way of understanding what health is - not a condition to be managed, but something that emerges from the full texture of how people actually live.

From that foundation, Real Lived Experience was built - the practical framework and tools that turn that understanding into insight, innovation, and strategy that genuinely connects with how life is lived.

The Platform

Bergson is the AI system we built to make Real Lived Experience perception available at scale. It is the only AI platform in health and care built on a genuine philosophical model of what experience is - drawing on Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, perception, and life to produce a form of intelligence that no data-driven system can replicate.

For any chronic condition, any population, anywhere in the world, Bergson generates Real Lived Outcomes, ecosystems, narratives, and design provocations in minutes - grounded in the actual relational and affective dynamics of lived experience rather than in clinical literature or survey data.

Ooex is our sister technology company. We licence its real-time lived experience platform - built to sense and respond to experience as it unfolds, and deployed with UK armed forces veterans with chronic pain in a project funded by the Office for Veterans' Affairs Health Innovation Fund.

The Methodology

The RLX Innovation Process integrates our outcome-driven innovation methodology - honed over nearly twenty years and deployed with leading medtech, pharma, and consumer health companies - with the RLX framework and Bergson.

It is the most rigorous and experience-grounded innovation process available in health and care, and it produces something conventional research cannot: innovation opportunities grounded in the actual states, capacities, and conditions people are trying to hold together in daily life.

Our track record

Since 2007 we have worked with organisations across the full spectrum of health and care - from global medtech and pharma companies to NHS trusts, health charities, government bodies, academic institutions, and non-traditional new entrants. Our clients have included Coloplast, Mundipharma, Sanofi, Lundbeck, Reckitt, Cochlear, and the UK Office for Veterans' Affairs, among many others.

We have conducted research and innovation projects across Europe, North America, India, China, Japan, Korea, and beyond - working directly with patients, carers, clinicians, and system leaders in over thirty countries.

What connects all of it is a consistent orientation: beginning from lived reality, not from system-defined abstractions. That orientation has produced work our clients describe as unlike anything they have encountered elsewhere in health innovation.

Our ecosystem

Umio operates as an integrated ecosystem of three connected platforms, each serving a distinct purpose and audience while sharing the same intellectual foundation.

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Experiential Intelligence for any condition, anywhere in the world, any population or other context. 

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Real-time lived experience sensing and co-composition for populations, communities and enterprises. 

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Research, insight, innovation, strategy, and education services for enterprises and health systems. 

A selection of organisations we have worked with: