Nick Peres
Nick Peres is Director of Digital Innovation & Transformation at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust and Professor of Interdisciplinary Health Innovation at Falmouth University. Over the past decade he has built and led the Trust’s Digital Futures Lab, a dedicated testbed for XR, AI, and digital health innovation that has grown from a self-funded patient-perspective film project to a nationally recognised development hub. His research explores the humanistic dimensions of digital transformation in healthcare; how immersive technology can reconstitute rather than displace the relational and empathic dimensions of care. This work is grounded in participatory design methodologies that position patient experience as an essential knowledge system alongside clinical expertise and digital capability. His published research includes accessible innovation, minimal viable simulation, national XR guidance and a series of studies on XR-mediated empathy and embodied cognition in clinical contexts.
Innovation at the boundary: A decade of XR in the NHS
This Expert Insight explores what it takes to establish and sustain an internal XR innovation function within an NHS Trust, and what becomes possible when you do. Drawing on a decade of experience building the Digital Futures Lab at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, Nick will share the boundary space methodology and testbed approach that creates the conditions for genuine XR innovation in healthcare: co-designing with patients and clinical staff, building productive relationships with commercial developers and researchers, and generating local evidence that national guidance alone cannot provide. The talk is honest about the realities of the NHS innovation landscape, not all projects reach clinical practice, and the gap between a promising pilot and sustained implementation is where many initiatives stall. Rather than a catalogue of successes, this is an account of how to build the infrastructure, the culture, and the coalitions that give XR the best chance of making a lasting difference to patients.
