Strolll leverages Microsoft Azure and HoloLens to improve neurological rehabilitation delivery for patients

Strolll empowers hospitals to deliver scalable, personalized Parkinson’s rehabilitation through its product Strolll, a first-of-its-kind digital therapeutic software solution built on Microsoft Azure and deployed through lightweight augmented reality glasses.

The challenge

With a rapid rise in Parkinson’s diagnoses, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) was facing mounting pressure to provide more personalized and consistent care to a growing patient population—without adding to clinician workloads or clinic-based appointment pressures.

Sensory cueing is an evidence-based physiotherapy intervention that helps reduce gait and balance issues in Parkinson’s. Patients typically require 12 physiotherapy sessions per year, broken up into two six-week courses. But waiting times for physiotherapy often exceed 12 months, and in-person appointments are resource-intensive and difficult to access for many patients, especially those with mobility limitations.

LTHT needed a new approach to expand the reach of Parkinson’s rehabilitation while maintaining quality and reducing cost.

The integrated solution

LTHT partnered with Strolll to pilot Strolll, a digital therapeutic software solution deployed through lightweight augmented reality glasses.

Strolll uses the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap platforms to deliver visual, audio, and haptic sensory cues directly into a patient’s real-world environment. Combined with gamified physiotherapy exercises, this approach enables patients to perform gait and balance therapy independently—whether in clinic or at home—with real-time data collection and personalization.

With Strolll, LTHT patients were able to increase their therapy engagement from 6–12 outpatient sessions per year to 42 sessions over six weeks, performed independently at home. The pilot demonstrated 100% adherence with zero adverse events. Patients reported greater motivation and independence, and therapists noted improved gait and balance performance.

It also reduced the annual rehabilitation costs per patient from £984 to £760, and each patient freed up eight hours of therapist time.

Partnership with Microsoft

Behind the scenes, Microsoft Azure provides the secure, scalable infrastructure to support Strolll’s remote rehabilitation model. Strolll leverages Azure for real time data capture and storage, remote clinical dashboards for therapists, role-based access to maintain NHS information governance standards, application deployment and updates across devices, and integration readiness with NHS systems for long-term scale.

Strolll chose Microsoft Azure to meet NHS security, scalability, and interoperability requirements. With Azure, Strolll could rapidly deploy its solution across a secure cloud backbone, manage NHS-compliant access controls, and support secure real-time exchange of sensitive data between patients, therapists, and devices.

Microsoft HoloLens 2 Augmented Reality glasses enabled immersive, real-world rehabilitation without the motion sickness or isolation often caused by VR-based therapies.

Strolll has partnered with Microsoft for more than just technology; they’re part of Microsoft for Startups, designed to help companies scale their operations and reach new customers.

“Microsoft for Startups is like being given a pre-configured rocket booster for your start-up. Suddenly, you're not just moving fast, you're playing in an entirely different stratosphere. It transforms your startup's scaling journey from a steady climb to a game-changing leap into orbit," said Jorgen Ellis, CEO & Co-Founder of Strolll.

Go-To-Market success

“We’ve been working with Strolll for over four years now and are very impressed by their technology, team, and vision. It’s been transformative for our rehabilitation service,” said Professor Rory O’Connor, Lead Clinician at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Building on the success of the pilot, Strolll, the University of Leeds, the University of York and Devices for Dignity, the NIHR Healthtech Research Centre in long term conditions, have secured £2.4 million in NIHR funding to deliver a large-scale clinical trial focused on Parkinson’s rehabilitation using the Strolll platform. This is the first major NIHR-backed clinical studies of augmented reality in rehabilitation.

Using Azure’s flexible and scalable architecture, Strolll is also adapting its platform to support rehabilitation for other neurological conditions, including stroke and multiple sclerosis, using the same infrastructure and deployment model. Trials are underway in collaboration with NHS and academic partners.

This collaboration demonstrates how cloud-first innovation can accelerate progress in healthcare—improving patient outcomes, enhancing workforce capacity, and delivering more accessible care across the system.