How NIHR Helped Advance Melo for Acquired Brain Injury Services
Over the past year, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has supported the next stage of Melo’s development through the NIHR i4i FAST programme.
The project aim was to explore how Melo (originally piloted in a single clinical environment) could scale to support clinicians working with individuals with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) across a variety of services and organisations. Twelve months later, the project has helped move Melo from an early-stage innovation toward a platform designed for real-world clinical adoption at scale.
The challenge: understanding complex behaviours
People living with acquired brain injury often experience complex behavioural changes such as agitation, aggression, impulsivity and emotional dysregulation.
Clinicians rely on structured tools like ABC charts, ABS and OAS-MNR to understand these behaviours and guide interventions. However, in many services these assessments are still recorded on paper or across multiple systems, making it difficult to identify patterns and coordinate care effectively.
Melo was developed to address this challenge by enabling clinicians to capture, analyse and share behavioural assessment data digitally in real time.
The project focus:
The NIHR FAST project focused on three key areas to prepare Melo for wider adoption.
Scaling across ABI services
Working with clinicians across the brain injury pathway helped shape a more flexible platform capable of supporting neurorehabilitation wards, specialist brain injury units and multidisciplinary teams.
Strengthening governance and safety
The project strengthened several important foundations for NHS adoption, including updated DCB0129 clinical safety documentation, continued Clinical Safety Officer oversight and reinforced DTAC compliance processes.
Shaping the platform with lived experience
In collaboration with the NIHR Brain Injury HealthTech Research Centre, a Patient and Public Involvement (PPIE) workshop brought together ABI survivors and family carers to share perspectives on how behavioural data should be captured, used and communicated.
What comes next?
With the project complete, the focus now shifts from development to expanding adoption across healthcare services.
By working with clinicians, researchers and people with lived experience, we are building the clinical and operational evidence needed to support wider implementation.
Our goal is simple: to help clinicians make earlier sense of complex patient behaviours and support better care for people living with acquired brain injury.
We are extremely grateful to NIHR and the i4i FAST programme for supporting this work.
Innovation in healthcare rarely happens in isolation. It requires collaboration between clinicians, researchers, patients and technology teams.
This project has been a powerful example of what can happen when those groups work together. And we’re only just getting started!
