For Hospitals & Clinics
Implementing avatar therapy in your service
Heka VR provides psychiatric services with a complete clinical solution for delivering avatar therapy: medical software, hardware, clinician training and certification, ongoing supervision, and technical support. We work with public hospitals, private clinics and residential treatment facilities across Europe.
Implementation
A new clinical offering, integrated into existing care
Avatar therapy is delivered by your own psychiatric professionals — typically clinical psychologists or psychiatrists already working with the patient population — as a structured intervention alongside standard care. A typical course is seven sessions of 60 minutes. Each session combines preparation, structured dialogue between the patient and the avatar, and reflection — with the time in dialogue varying by session and patient, depending on the clinical work being done.
Sessions take place in a single clinical room. The clinician sits beside the patient with a laptop, controlling the avatar and the dialogue. The patient wears a VR headset and noise-cancelling headphones. No second room, no second clinician.
Operations
One clinician, one room
Early generations of avatar therapy required two rooms and complex coordination — the clinician in one room controlling the avatar, the patient in another interacting with it on screen. Heka VR's immersive platform consolidates this into a single room with the clinician seated beside the patient throughout.
For the service, this means lower room utilisation, simpler scheduling, and no need to dedicate two clinical spaces to a single therapy session. For the patient — many of whom are in vulnerable states when confronting a distressing inner voice for the first time — the continuous physical presence of a trusted clinician supports safety and trust through the most demanding parts of the work.
This tool provides a new and engaging way to address persistent symptoms, making therapy sessions more dynamic and impactful.
Luciana Diaz Cutraro, ClinPsyD, PhDClinical Psychologist · Hospital de Mollet, Spain
Who delivers
Your clinicians, certified to the method
Avatar therapy is delivered by your existing clinical staff. Heka VR does not place external therapists in your service. We train and certify the clinicians on your team to deliver the intervention to fidelity, and we provide ongoing supervision to support them in practice.
Certification typically suits clinical psychologists and psychiatrists with experience in the relevant patient population. The training programme combines technical training on the platform, clinical training in the avatar therapy method using research validated treatment protocols, and supervised practice.
What we provide
A complete clinical solution
Medical software
CE-marked Class I MDR. Continuously developed and updated.
Validated hardware
VR headsets and peripherals, specified and supplied to clinical standards.
Clinical training & certification
A structured programme leading to certification in avatar therapy. Required for clinicians delivering the intervention using our platform.
Ongoing clinical supervision
Monthly supervision from senior clinical specialists, supporting fidelity and complex cases.
Technical support
Direct support for your clinical and IT teams.
Patient experience
What the patient encounters
Before the first session, the patient and clinician work together to characterise the patient's most distressing inner voice — its content, tone and qualities — and to create a digital avatar that embodies it. In subsequent sessions, the clinician facilitates structured dialogue between the patient and the avatar, gradually shifting the power dynamic as the patient's authority in the relationship grows.
The most commonly reported side effect of VR-based intervention is mild simulator sickness, which typically resolves within a few sessions as tolerance develops. As avatar therapy is an emotionally engaging intervention by design, patients may experience transient distress during early sessions; clinicians are trained to monitor for this and to adjust the intervention accordingly. Patients continue receiving their standard care throughout.
After 27 years I'm finally voices free.
Indications
Where Heka VR is implementation-ready today
Schizophrenia spectrum disorders, with primary focus on persistent auditory verbal hallucinations, including treatment-resistant presentations.
Avatar therapy in further indications — eating disorders, OCD, depression and others — is available through research collaboration. If your service has a research interest in extending avatar therapy to a new patient group, please get in touch.
FAQ
Common questions
Do our clinicians need prior experience with VR?+
No. Technical training is part of the certification programme.
How long does implementation take?+
From contract to first patient session is typically 90 days, allowing time for clinician training, certification and any local approvals.
How does this integrate with existing care?+
Avatar therapy is designed as an adjunctive intervention alongside standard care, not as a replacement for it. Patients continue with their usual treatment throughout.
What does it cost?+
Pricing depends on scope — number of clinicians certified, expected patient volume, and contract length. We discuss this in an initial conversation once we understand your service context.
Is there a regulatory pathway in our country?+
Heka VR is CE marked under EU MDR as a Class I medical device. We can discuss country-specific implementation in an initial conversation.
Talk to us about your service
The most efficient next step is a conversation. We'll learn about your patient population, clinical workflows and service context, walk you through the platform, and outline what implementation would look like for your team.