Q1: What is RLX (Real Lived Experience)?

Real Lived Experience (RLX) is a new paradigm for understanding and supporting health, not as a clinical status, but as a lived, relational, dynamic field of becoming.

It recognises that health is shaped not just by biology, but by how people move, feel, relate, inhabit places, use technologies, and navigate time.

Rather than seeing people as patients with symptoms, RLX perceives them as human beings in motion, composing life moment by moment, with others and the world.

It uses perception, not protocol; relation, not transaction; and emergence, not standardisation.

Q2: Does RLX mean we no longer need medical treatment, diagnosis, or traditional clinical care?

Not at all.

RLX does not reject medicine, it reframes its place. Clinical expertise remains essential, especially for disease detection, emergency care, surgical interventions, pharmacology, and critical care. But RLX highlights that health is not reducible to disease, and care is not limited to treatment.

RLX complements and deepens clinical care by:

• Capturing how illness and health are lived over time

• Revealing what matters to the person beyond the diagnosis

• Identifying expressive patterns and thresholds before they collapse into crises

• Supporting affective, relational, and social dimensions that medicine often cannot reach

As one veteran said: "Now I can show my doctor what’s really going on."

Q3: So where does RLX “sit” in the healthcare system?

RLX is not a bolt-on service, it is a perceptual foundation that can be embedded:

• In primary care to inform consultations with lived context

• In digital health tools to shape feedback loops and suggestions

• In community support models to scaffold peer-based wellbeing

• In health innovation to reorient solution-building from real, relational experience

RLX can inform the early signs of struggle, the conditions for change, and the unseen aspects of recovery. It sits before, alongside, and beyond the clinical pathway.

Q4: How does RLX differ from other “patient experience” approaches?

Where traditional patient experience models often:

• Focus on satisfaction scores or retrospective feedback

• Assume people have a stable identity and narrative

• Work from predefined care pathways or personas

RLX works differently:

• It captures experience as emergent, dynamic, and relational

• It senses change in real time, not just after discharge

• It focuses on expressings, intervals, and thresholds, the subtle shifts that reveal deeper meaning

• It enables co-composition, not just co-design by supporting experience as it unfolds, not just designing services around it.

Q5: Is RLX only for chronic pain or veterans?

No. Veterans were the proof-of-concept population, but the model is scalable across:

• Mental health and trauma recovery

• Cancer survivorship and palliative care

• Long COVID and multi-morbidity

• Endometriosis, fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions

• Menopause, neurodivergence, or even grief and life transitions

Anywhere experience is prolonged, affective, relational, or hard to articulate, RLX adds transformative value.

Q6: How does RLX work in digital platforms like Ooex?

Ooex is a Real Lived Experience in Motion platform. It enables users to:

• Capture expressive moments and activities, not just symptoms

• Share with peers in a face-based, affective feed

• Track patterns and thresholds across time

• Engage in co-composed support and value-aligned action

• Reflect with clinicians or community partners using real context

It’s a platform that perceives, holds, and amplifies what matters, not by monitoring for compliance, but by listening with care.

Q7: Is RLX measurable? What outcomes does it support?

RLX resists reductive metrics, but it does support meaningful, traceable outcomes:

• Increased self-awareness and agency

• Reduced isolation and emotional distress

• Improved engagement with services and activities

• Earlier recognition of personal or relational thresholds

• Emergence of new value-driven behaviours

• More contextually informed care decisions

These outcomes are qualitative, relational, and directional, aligned with the movement of life, not abstract benchmarks.

Q8: How do professionals use RLX in practice?

RLX supports professionals to:

• Perceive earlier what may not yet be visible in clinical language

• Relate more ethically, recognising the person as a shifting, feeling presence

• Design differently, with attentiveness to affect, relation, and the not-yet-formed

• Respond dynamically to directional shifts in experience, not just to symptoms

Clinicians, designers, peer supporters, and enterprise partners can use RLX tools like Ooex to become more attuned, without needing to be experts in every experience.

Q9: Can RLX scale? Can it work across systems?

Yes, and that’s the point.

RLX is not about delivering another service. It’s about enabling systems to:

• Perceive what they’ve been missing

• Support relational co-creation at scale through platforms like Ooex

• Shift from performance-based accountability to presence-based responsibility

Whether in a national health system or a grassroots community project, RLX provides the common ground of real human becoming, across any geography, condition, or role.

Q10: How is this different from therapy or medical care?

RLX does not replace therapy or medicine, they enhance them. Traditional care often intervenes after a crisis or focuses on what can be named and treated. RLX works before, during, and between formal care moments by:

• Surfacing subtle signals of change

• Offering space to express what isn’t yet diagnosable

• Strengthening relationships that support wellbeing

• Supporting directionality: the way someone is moving, not just what’s “wrong”

It gives people a way to make sense of their life, not just manage a condition.

Q11: Is this approach evidence-based?

Yes, but it expands what counts as evidence.

RLX is grounded in:

• Over two decades of research in real lived experience, design, and innovation across diverse health conditions

• Clinical models like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

• Philosophies of time, relation, and perception (e.g. Bergson, Levinas)

• Field-tested insights from the UK veteran pilot, co-designed with users

We also use feedback loops, reflective data, and behavioural insight to show impact. But we refuse to flatten people into KPIs. The evidence is in the transformations, subtle and lasting.

Q12: What does RLX mean for design, innovation, and systems change?

RLX shifts design from delivering solutions to participating in emergence.

Instead of asking “How can we fix this problem?” RLX asks:

• What is happening here, in the flow of experience?

• What is becoming possible? What is being suppressed?

• How do we design with - not around - real complexity?

It enables:

• Deeper insight into unmet or misunderstood needs

• New trajectories of innovation from below

• More ethical, situated, and sustainable forms of change

It’s not about scaling what works, but about perceiving what wants to emerge.

Q13: How do I engage with RLX?

You can engage with RLX through our services at Umio. We offer:

RLX Design Services

• Co-Composition Labs: Immersive RLX processes to explore lived conditions, thresholds, and transformation potential

• Expressive Design Projects: Situational RLX insight generation, idea shaping, and relational design support

• Platform Partnerships: Strategic collaboration on RLX-based digital tools like Ooex

Learning & Education

• Workshops: Foundations of RLX, perception training, and applied insight

• Advisory: For health systems, enterprises, and innovation teams ready to reorient around real lived experience

RLX is not something we implement. It’s something we learn to perceive, feel, and co-compose - together.