Harmona

Over het initiatief / About the initiative

In welke fase zit jouw initiatief? / In what stage is your initiative?

Uitgewerkt conceptfase

Heb je jouw initiatief al gevalideerd? / Did you validate your initiative?

Yes — over the past year, we’ve validated the need and solution fit through 40+ deep interviews with patients and healthcare professionals, iterative design feedback, and expert reviews. Their input shaped every feature of Heart Harmona — from the VR experience to the mobile rituals — ensuring our solution addresses real-life gaps in education, engagement, and emotional support. We’re now preparing for our first in-hospital pilot.

Meer informatie over jouw initiatief / More info about your initiative

Harmona is redesigning the way patients navigate chronic conditions, not by monitoring them, but by empowering them. Our first product, Heart Harmona, is a two-part system designed to build emotional resilience, behavior change, and long-term self-management. It starts inside the hospital with a short, immersive VR experience that doesn’t just “educate,” but rewires how patients relate to their diagnosis. After discharge, a mobile app picks up the thread, not with cold data tracking, but with guided rituals, emotional check-ins, and human-centered nudges grounded in behavioral science.

We’re not another dashboard for clinicians or another passive tool for patients. We’re building a bridge between emotion and behavior, between clinical care and daily life, between knowing and doing. Co-designed with patients and clinicians, Heart Harmona is implementable in real care settings, aligned with workflow realities, and designed to lift the burden off overworked nurses, while deeply supporting the humans on the other side of the diagnosis.

This isn’t digital health as usual — this is what self-management looks like when it’s done with heart, science, and strategy.

Wat is er anders/nieuw aan jouw idee/oplossing t.o.v. bestaande oplossingen? / What is different/new about your idea/solution compared to existing solutions??

What sets Heart Harmona apart is our fundamental shift in perspective: we don’t design for patients, we design with them. While most healthtech tools are built for professionals — focusing on remote monitoring, symptom tracking, or compliance — we center the real-life behavior, motivation, and mindset of the patient.

Our innovation is rooted in behavioral science: theories like COM-B, Health Belief Model, and Self-Determination Theory help us identify why patients struggle with long-term self-care. Rather than just pushing reminders, we focus on what drives behavior — capability, opportunity, and motivation — and build systems that support habit formation, emotional regulation, and intrinsic motivation. These models guide our structure, language, content, and interactions.

That’s why we begin with immersive VR education at the hospital, not to deliver facts, but to create emotional bonding and understanding of their condition. Then we follow with a daily-use mobile app that turns care instructions into personally meaningful rituals, helping patients feel in control, supported, and empowered.

Being co-developed with clinicians and patients, Heart Harmona doesn’t just help people do what they’re told, it helps them want to do it. That’s the behavioral shift we’re creating.

Wat zijn jouw volgende stappen om het verder te ontwikkelen? / What are your next steps to develop the initiative?

We’ve entered the execution phase of Heart Harmona with two key development tracks running in parallel for almost two months. On the VR side, we’ve scripted and are building two short immersive experiences to be used during hospitalization. These sessions will introduce patients to their condition using intuitive metaphors — like a water pipe system to explain heart failure — and let them actively rehearse behaviors such as medication timing, fluid management, and early symptom recognition. Instead of passively receiving information, patients will see the consequences of decisions in real-time, guided by a virtual mentor inside a safe, emotionally grounding simulation.

Meanwhile, the mobile app is being shaped through an in-depth benchmark study focused on older adult-friendly apps. Our goal is to translate clinical instructions into personalized daily rituals, not overwhelming to-do lists. We’re investing time to deeply research the right tone, design elements, and cognitive load thresholds for older users.

On the medical side, we’re progressing in discussions with Amsterdam UMC to co-design a feasibility study that will capture early impact metrics like understanding, confidence, and self-care skills. Everything is co-created with patients and professionals, making sure we build something that fits into lives and systems, not just ideas.

Wat heb je nodig om (nog meer) impact te maken met dit initiatief? / What do you need to make (more) impact with this initiative?

To make a deeper impact, we need closer and continuous collaboration with medical teams, both clinicians and researchers. In the Netherlands, probably like in many countries, early-stage healthtech startups often face barriers when trying to integrate with the formal healthcare system. That’s why we’ve partnered with IXA (Innovation Exchange Amsterdam) to move toward institutional collaboration and co-design with Amsterdam UMC. Having medical champions who understand both the clinical workflows and patient needs from within the system is crucial, and we’re actively seeking advisors and mentors who can help us navigate this landscape from the inside.

In addition to this, we’re looking for a mentor deeply rooted in the Dutch healthcare system, someone who understands how change happens from within and can help us align our innovation with real-world clinical culture. Having such a mentor will help us ask the right questions, build meaningful bridges, and avoid reinventing the wheel where wisdom already exists.