Sympatient

About Sympatient

Sympatient is the first to build a digital anxiety clinic. Using VR, Sympatient gets the best out of digital psychotherapy. The combination of digital therapeutics and real-life sessions with therapists makes a personalised treatment accessible to all.

Streaming high quality VR has been tricky. Before, people were in need of expensive VR equipment and needed to download high resolution content to have a proper viewing experience. With Tiledmedia’s High Quality VR solution, Sympatient enables anyone in need of digital therapy to use their VR service. No need for downloading or expensive headsets.

The first digital anxiety clinic

As the first deliverer of digital anxiety therapy, Sympatient enables patients to receive VR exposure therapy with app-based cognitive behavioural therapy in their homes. They offer treatments for people with agoraphobia, social phobia or panic disorder. VR also integrates digital anxiety therapy with real therapy sessions to ensure high effectiveness and patient satisfaction. Sympatient’s care offerings provide patients with the flexibility they need, while incorporating contact with real therapists and doctors.

With VR, Sympatient can stage realistic situations for their patients to practice how to confront their real fears in a virtual world. For example, patients will be in an airplane with turbulence and can practice how to stay calm. Or they will be in a dark forest where they can practice handling their feelings of fear. Immersion into a virtual world is safe for the patient as it is not real after all.

The anxiety pandemic

More than 330 million people around the globe suffer from serious anxiety disorders. The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened the situation by adding an estimate of 76 million cases on top of that. Only a minuscule group of these people get access to adequate mental health care. Sympatient tackles this global challenge by delivering the best care possible for their patients’ anxiety disorders.

How to reach anybody with high quality therapy

To be able to make psychotherapy widely available with VR, patients need to be able to use this from their homes. However, streaming high quality VR over existing networks has been tricky. It requires a lot of bandwidth to deliver a high quality VR video stream over existing networks. Before, this has resulted in low VR video quality. This is troublesome for the effectiveness of the therapy sessions.

For the optimal psychotherapy treatment, it is necessary for the stream to be clear and responsive. The experience needs to be realistic for the patients to experience it as if it was real therapy.

Virtual reality for a better reality

Our High Quality VR solution enables high quality VR video streaming over existing networks. There is no per-user processing required. All Sympatient’s patients are able to stream the psychotherapy services in their own homes. All of Sympatient’s VR content is video on demand. The High Quality VR solution consists of the ClearVR SDK and the ClearVR Cloud.

To stream the therapy sessions in VR, they are not in need of a pricey VR headset; they can use the cardboard headsets and easily plug in their own smartphones. Sympatient decided to go with the cardboard type of headset to make their therapy as accessible as possible.

This technology is scalable to millions of users simultaneously over any CDN. Sympatient is able to reach as many patients as they need. This makes the therapy available for an even larger audience. ­­

High Quality VR helps Sympatient in their mission of delivering the best possible care for anyone in need of psychotherapy.

Sympatient benefits from the following ClearVR features:

• Efficient delivery of high-resolution on-demand VR
• No need for patients to download high resolution content
• Highly scalable distribution of viewport-dependent VR180 and VR360; compatible with existing CDNs; no need for per-user processing
• Fast response times to user interaction
• The ClearVR player is available for mobile devices, enabling Sympatient to use the cardboard VR goggles

Tiledmedia’s deliverables for Sympatient are as follows:

• ClearVR SDK
  • Unity SDK for integration with Sympatient App
  • SDK handles all video playback in Sympatient App: on-demand viewport adaptive ABR streams

• ClearVR Cloud
  • Fully redundant tiled transcoding 
  • Tiled transcoding for on-demand content assets
  • Advanced API to allow control of the transcoding process

Interested in more information? Contact us!