Ooex for Armed Forces Veterans and Families
Ooex is a unique peer-peer lived experience app and agency/enterprise platform. It supports UK armed forces veterans and their families to overcome mental illness, chronic pain, disability, trauma and other entangled issues to lead a more fulfilled life.
How it Works
Rethink and do more
Getting unstuck from limiting conditions requires rethinking your outlook, being open to new possibilities and taking committed action. Ooex helps you to accept your condition or circumstances and drop the struggle. When you do, new opportunities for living the life you truly value come into view.
Find, meet and help fellow veterans
Help others to better understand you
Find and access relevant support
Go beyond your service self
Developed with UK Armed Forces Veterans
Ooex’s prototype, developed with UK Armed Forces veterans, highlights the platform’s transformative potential. Funded by the UK government’s Office for Veterans’ Affairs, this initiative demonstrated how authentic lived experiences can inspire solutions tailored to specific needs, creating real and lasting impact.
Key app features
Novel Interface and Feed
Capture meaningful experiences for any kind of activity, event or occasion that you do, from gardening to a night at the cinema, from a gentle walk or fast run to a night in the pub, from cooking to just resting. Keep a record of your experiences on your personal feed and learn what works for you and what doesn't.
Peer-Peer Support System
Connect with your veteran friends and find mates you've lost touch with. Start sharing your experiences in your veteran group, and exchange support, ideas, and encouragement to push you all on. Just knowing a friend is there can make a big difference in itself.
Experience Learning Engine
Over time, discover hidden patterns and trends in your experiences. Share them and ask the Ooex learning engine for ideas to obtain personalised recommendations for activities, support and resources to help you do and achieve more in your life.
Activities, Events, Support
Find veteran support and things to do near where you live or are. Propose, create, add, organise, and promote your own support, activities and events. Review and record your experience of support, event or activity and share it into the whole Ooex veteran network for others to discover and do too.
Feedback
Veteran reviews of the advanced prototype
“I’m not a veteran that’s been out and done a lot of tours and got a lot of medals. It’s a strange feeling, like a bit lesser you know, but maybe sharing the experience could equalise that, you know, you’re the same.”
“If this app had been available, I’d have been all over it. I’d have been like, what else can I do that’s local to me? Who else can I chat to? What have they been doing that I could be doing? And what have I been doing that they could be doing?”
“If you get a little bit of a boost which something like this could create then that would help improve so many different elements of like your mental health, your well-being.”
“It’s good that other veterans can see if you’ve been doing something and you’re in absolute agony and it’s made your mental health worse. You know, they can give you a message and say, oh, you’re all right mate?”
“It would be good to see what’s available locally, services and activities and people with similar injuries, abilities and service background, where I’m not going to turn up and everyone’s a marathon runner you know?”