Around 15% of adults live with tinnitus, a persistent ringing or buzzing with no external source and, for most, no adequate solution. For those with severe symptoms, the consequences extend well beyond discomfort: difficulty concentrating, broken sleep, anxiety, and depression that compound over years. Medications are widely sought, but have limited evidence of effectiveness. The intervention with the strongest evidence, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), has rarely been accessible to the people who need it most.

Like many clinicians working with tinnitus, Professor Vinaya Manchaiah saw the same painful pattern again and again. People were desperate for help, but the support that could actually reduce their distress was difficult to access. He began by delivering a CBT-based programme one-to-one with patients. It worked, but it could only reach the people in front of him. He wanted to make it available to millions.

Together with Professor Gerhard Andersson at Linköping University in Sweden and Dr Eldre Beukes at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, Vinaya helped develop one of the world’s most extensively validated digital tinnitus programmes.

Across multiple randomised controlled trials, 60-70% of users experienced clinically meaningful improvement after completing the programme, and those gains held for at least a year. The team then replatformed the programme to Cogniss so it could move beyond the research setting and into patients’ hands.