The challenge

Chronic pain in veterans is vastly underestimated and poorly understood. It rarely presents as a single condition - it arrives woven together with PTSD, trauma, disrupted identity, the struggle to transition to civilian life, and a health system that was never designed to see any of those dimensions together.

Standard clinical pain management frameworks measure pain scores and functional outcomes. They cannot capture what it is actually like to live with pain as a veteran - the hypervigilance, the occupational fragility, the social withdrawal, the compulsion to conceal, the daily negotiation between military identity and civilian reality. These are the dimensions that determine whether a veteran gets better or stays stuck - and they were entirely invisible to existing approaches.

What we did

Funded by a competitive grant from the UK Office for Veterans' Affairs Health Innovation Fund, Umio undertook a twelve-month research and platform design project with veterans across all branches of the Armed Forces.

We conducted in-depth qualitative research with 35 veterans living with chronic pain, drawing on RLX methods to surface the actual texture of their daily experience — not what they scored on a pain scale but what they were trying to hold together, avoid, and sustain in daily life. We engaged veteran health agencies including OpRestore and OpCourage throughout, and used our Bergson platform to generate a comprehensive set of Real Lived Outcomes for this specific population.

From that foundation, we designed and prototyped the Ooex platform - a real-time lived experience tool that allows veterans to express what is shifting in their experience, connect with peers who understand both military culture and chronic pain, and engage with support that is attuned to how their experience actually unfolds.

What we found

The research produced five distinct veteran outlooks on chronic pain - each representing a different relationship to pain, identity, and the possibility of change. These are not clinical categories. They are experiential portraits, each with different implications for what kind of support works, when, and how.

Across all five outlooks, several dimensions of experience emerged that no standard pain pathway currently addresses: the relationship between hypervigilance and pain amplification, the occupational identity fragility that makes over-performance and subsequent relapse a consistent pattern, the role of peer credibility in determining whether support is trusted, and the cascading financial and social consequences of pain that standard clinical interventions leave entirely untouched.

The full set of Real Lived Outcomes - 100 outcomes across ten themes - is available as a downloadable example from Bergson. It is one of the most comprehensive pictures of veteran pain experience available anywhere.

What we built

The Ooex platform achieved proof of concept at the end of the twelve-month project. Veteran feedback was universally positive. The platform does not ask veterans what their pain score is. It asks what is shifting - and meets them there.

The project's success led to the establishment of Ooex Limited as a dedicated technology company to develop and license the platform to veteran agencies, NHS providers, and organisations internationally. Ooex is currently seeking seed investment to fund the next phase of development.

What it means

This project demonstrated something that matters beyond the veteran population: that when innovation begins from the actual lived experience of a condition - rather than from clinical classifications and outcome measures - it produces tools that people describe as unlike anything they have encountered in the health system.

That is not a design achievement. It is a perceptual one. And it is what Real Lived Experience makes possible.