Ghent Metropolitan Area
I'm Gareth, founder of withVR. Expert by experience. I'm a person who stutters. I've been building VR tools for speech-language professionals since 2016, starting with my undergraduate thesis at Nottingham Trent University. I went on to MSc Medical Product Design, then a PhD in Engineering Technology at KU Leuven (Belgium) funded by the FWO Strategic Basic Grant. In 2020 I left academia to build withVR full-time, because clinicians and researchers needed the tool now, not in four more years. I founded withVR BV on 22 October 2020 - International Stuttering Awareness Day - and put all of my savings into it. Therapy withVR is now used in 16 countries (including 18 US states) with peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Voice and the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Three things make Therapy withVR different: • Evidence-based - every claim is backed by peer-reviewed research at withvr.app/evidence • Clinician-controlled - speech therapists stay in charge of every session; the platform never replaces clinical judgment • Social-model framing - barriers live in environments, not in people; the platform expands the situations clients can confidently participate in I'm a Research Affiliate at The George Washington University, a Professional Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS), an Alumni Fellow at Nottingham Trent, and a member of Meta's AR/VR User Research Panel. My work has been covered by BBC, The Independent, and Trends, and supported by Google, NHS, the European Commission, and Orange. I contributed to "Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and Extended Reality in Speech-Language Pathology" (Hall and Boisvert, Plural Publishing 2025), co-writing a section of the introduction and a chapter on XR use cases in SLP. Awards: European Patient Digital Health Awards 2023 (Winner, Mental Health & Social Support); NHS Digital Innovation Excellence Award; XR Awards 2024 finalist (two categories); 2Gether-International Pitch Competition Winner. I've spoken at 120 events in 22 countries since 2016. Recent highlights: keynote at Valid Gains Through Video Games 2026 (Monmouth University, NJ); invited speaker at the Digital Wellbeing Summit 2022 in Dammam alongside Simon Sinek, James Clear, Marc Randolph, and Mo Gawdat; ASHA Convention 2023 with Erik X Raj; ICDVRAT 2024 with Skip Rizzo. If you're an SLP, researcher, or clinic director curious about Therapy withVR, DM me or email [email protected]. I read every message myself.
Ph.D. in Engineering Technology titled 'Virtual reality as a tool for lighting design'. Based in the Light & Lighting Laboratory on Technology Campus Ghent at KU Leuven.
Ph.D. in Engineering Technology, titled "Virtual reality as a tool for lighting design".