Supervised VR pain-coping programme for physio clinics and pain centres
TL;DR Easequest gives physiotherapy chains and hospital pain clinics a six-to-eight-week VR course for chronic back and knee pain. Short headset sessions teach coping skills alongside normal treatment. Clinics pay a monthly licence and charge patients per course. It's an add-on therapy licensed as a medical device, and it is not a cure.
Indian surveys put chronic pain at 13% to 19% of adults, depending on how you define it[1][2], and the higher figure means 180–200 million people. Women, people over 60, knees and lower backs dominate[1].
Very few reach real help. Only 4.8% of people with chronic pain had seen a pain physician while about 72% leaned on painkillers[1], and in an eight-city study 56% were unhappy with their treatment[2]. Physiotherapy is where a lot of them end up, with 35% using it[1].
But a physio visit is mostly exercise and heat. Fear of movement and catastrophising make pain worse and get little attention, because India has very few pain psychologists.
What it does, clinically: adjunctive treatment under supervision. Easequest is a therapy, not screening or diagnosis. It adds coping skills to existing physio or medical care and claims no cure. Pain-therapy software has a medical purpose, so it falls under the Medical Devices Rules[3], and my estimate is Class B or C.
Here's how it works - a physiotherapist or pain doctor enrols a patient, who then does 10–15 minute sessions at the clinic over six to eight weeks. Sessions cover guided breathing, pain education in Hindi, Tamil or English, graded movement in calm settings and skills for flare-ups. The AI adjusts the next session from pain ratings and movement and eases off when someone feels queasy. Clinicians see attendance, pain and function on a dashboard. The headsets are enterprise units locked in kiosk mode, so nobody wanders off into a game.
The seed pitched a platform that solves chronic pain through neuroplasticity. The evidence supports a lot less than that, and an independent 2025 review of 54 meta-analyses found mostly short-term benefit[4]. The best-known consumer VR headsets aren't officially sold in India either, so home use has to wait.
Patients pay through the clinic as part of a course, and I'd assume ₹3,000–8,000 per patient. Physiotherapy and rehab chains buy first, since that's where pain patients already go, paying an assumed ₹25,000–60,000 per site per month. Hospital pain, orthopaedic and oncology departments come next. A VR pain system worth ₹25 L went to the Cancer Institute in Adyar in 2025[5]. No Indian insurer that covers VR therapy turned up in the research.
The US FDA created a device category for VR pain therapy in January 2023[6], and at least four products have been cleared since, one on an enterprise headset in August 2025. CDSCO finalised its medical device software guidance in July 2026[7]. Indian clinics already use VR too. One Indian VR rehab provider reports more than 11,000 patients and 55 partner centres[8], mostly for stroke rehab.
Nobody sizes VR pain therapy in India. The closest neighbour is VR in healthcare, which one market research firm puts at US$244.9M in 2024, about ₹2,370 Cr, growing 32.4% a year[9]. About 90% of that is headset hardware though.
If you want a real number then build it bottom-up - count physio and rehab clinics, multiply by a monthly licence and add course fees. Those clinic counts still need sourcing.
The reference point is a US eight-week home VR programme for chronic low back pain, FDA-authorised in 2021, which won US reimbursement. A second US developer got FDA clearance for its VR pain product in 2023, largely on grants. In India, a VR rehab clinic network could add pain[8], and one home-healthcare provider offers VR therapy in five metros.
Nobody sells a licensed, clinic-run VR pain course in Indian languages. That's the gap.
| Difficulty | Hard (58/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹3.2–5.5 Cr |
| Time to launch | 18–30 months |
Regulation sets the pace here. A new pain-therapy product will probably need an Indian clinical investigation and a quality system, and every software update goes through change control. Making clinically sound VR content that older patients can sit through is skilled work, and after that you still have to train physiotherapists and keep headsets running across a lot of clinics.
Yes. Easequest is a therapy, so it's medical device software and needs approval before any clinic uses it on patients.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI change the treatment plan or judge whether pain is improving clinically. The physiotherapist or pain doctor makes those calls, and the software only assists.
Want to work out the AI layer for Easequest? Talk to Yash →
I think a clinic-based version is worth testing, especially if you have physiotherapy or pain-medicine networks. It is not a quick consumer app though. If you want home VR at scale then wait for an Indian payer to show up. Prove first that most Indian patients finish a course in a real clinic and that their pain and function scores move.
My estimate is ₹3.2–5.5 Cr, covering content, enterprise headsets, a clinical study and the CDSCO licence. The kit breaks it down line by line.
Yes. Pain-therapy software has a medical purpose, so it needs CDSCO approval as medical device software, probably backed by Indian clinical data.
Yes, and the US already has a device category for VR pain therapy. Every market has its own device rules, so check with your regulator first.
The free Easequest validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the CDSCO and clinical-study checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for clinics, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking of building Easequest or something like it? The make-or-break bit is settling the device class and the evidence plan before you build much content, and that's the kind of thing I help founders with. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.