LIFT Music: Empowering Minds Through Music

The latest DigitalHealth.London Launchpad cohort, which was delivered between September 2025 and November 2025, supported 20 early-stage digital health companies across London. Across 10 weeks, the companies were equipped with the essential knowledge they needed to introduce new products and services for current NHS and social care challenges.

In this guest blog, Launchpad company Headsoup shares its interactive music creation app: LIFT Music. The launch follows early engagement in classroom settings and care homes to develop the solution, which is designed to support people to create music through gestures.

LIFT Music is an improvisation app designed for people to make music through movement. By translating simple gestures into music, LIFT Music stimulates cognitive engagement, emotional expression and wellbeing, whilst promoting agency and creativity. This low-cost, easy-to-use app also provides measurable data reports to monitor user engagement and progress.

Music therapy has a wide range of benefits, such as cognitive stimulation. For example, a systematic review of 11 studies that explored the benefits of music therapy for people with Alzheimer’s disease demonstrated improvements in memory, language and orientation. Yet, access to music therapy is often constrained by staff training, limited resources and a lack of equipment.

LIFT Music responds directly to these barriers. It was inspired by early sessions with people living with dementia and brain injury, where we observed their powerful interactions with music. From here, the core music software was integrated with gesture control, introducing the ability to create and improvise music. Now, users do not just passively listen to music with our solution, but can actively engage in music improvisation.

Every session is also automatically recorded to track engagement, movement and interaction, compiling this data into downloadable reports for care notes, family updates or learning reviews. This built-in reporting saves clinicians and carers valuable time while reducing the administrative burden associated with care documentation.

LIFT Music has evolved through direct collaboration with dementia care environments, music therapists, brain injury support groups and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) schools. This includes our pilot partnership with Woodside Academy, a SEND school in Bexley, London, which took place over four months. Autistic students aged 4 to 16 were supported to use the therapeutic solution through group sessions and 1:1s. Around 80% of students participated in the sessions, with initial benefits including emotional regulation, focus and confidence. Over months of co-development and testing, we saw remarkable outcomes from increased engagement to positive changes in behaviour, which you can read more about in our case studies.

In settings where music therapy equipment and specialist staffing are costly, LIFT Music offers a scalable, digital alternative that aligns with the NHS Long Term Plan to deploy digitally enabled care. The app is intuitive, requires no specialist training, and runs on phones or tablet devices, making it an affordable, accessible solution that can be easily integrated into care pathways.

LIFT Music is launching after participation in the DigitalHealth.London Launchpad programme. It has partnerships with the National Activity Providers Association (NAPA), Technology in Music Education (TIME) and the British Association of Music Therapists (BAMT), as well as collaborating with several universities in the UK and abroad, to further explore its therapeutic impact and digital health potential.

LIFT Music – Smart, Accessible, Data-Driven Music Therapy for All. Find out more.

Headsoup is part of cohort 8 of the DigitalHealth.London Launchpad programme.

DigitalHealth.London Launchpad is funded by the UK Government via the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF). It is delivered by the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London in partnership with the Office of Life Sciences, CW+, NHS England and the Mayor of London.

For more information, please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-
shared-prosperity-fund-prospectus.