Mental health and digital health solutions : new publication spotlight
Bringing research to life: Insights from the podcast episode with Lucy Cesnakova at the Digital Medicine Society (DiME)
Below is a quick overview and my own reflections from the podcast on what this means if you are building or researching in this space.
Note - I was not involved in this study, but for reasons I explain below I was very interested in its discussion.
Global context and background
The DiME team conducted this study with funding from the Wellcome trust, for whom of course mental health is a big priority. To set the scene:
Huge expansion of tools serving mental health needs in recent times, driven by problems with access to healthcare workers, and the opportunity for people to engage with tools digitally that overcome stigma related barriers.
Not great depth on what good looks like in the digital mental health space
Societies have become more heterogenous. Cultural nuance and contextual artefacts from peoples’ home contexts now increasingly important, especially in so called high income settings.
Big variations in policy, research, practice and culture across geographies. I was excited to explore the insights from this study that sought out to gather this, and INTENTIONALLY also included low and middle income settings.
The landscape of healthcare and global health funding is rapidly evolving, with significant global changes influencing healthcare delivery. Political shifts and funding cuts have had cascading effects on all health initiatives for underserved populations around the world. Given this changing context, it is critical to examine digital health interventions from a global perspective.
This paper addresses a few gaps in the research.
Key gaps addressed were breaking silos, combining insights from diverse contexts, translating research to actionable things that developers and manufacturers can take on board.
This is additionally important as the industry matures over time and companies and health systems think deeper about evidence generation.
Image showing the breadth of input across geographies and pother demographics Taken from the DiMe publication Advancing the use of sensor-based digital health technologies for mental health research and clinical practice, 2025.
Quick method overview
This was a big gathering of qualitative insights from multiple stakeholders from varying domains and contexts.
Here’s what they covered:
Scoping Literature Review Analysing existing studies to establish the current evidence base.
Interviews and Surveys Conversations with healthcare providers, researchers, policymakers, and individuals with lived experience.
Delphi Method Approach Gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback to refine insights and extract the most important parts
Focus Groups Synthesising findings to identify common themes and discrepancies across expert perspectives and geographies.
Lucy described a major challenge they encountered was managing and synthesizing the vast amount of data from diverse sources to generate actionable insights. No mean feat for the research team to cover it all, and make sure they retrieved as much signal as possible.
Key Insights and Discussion Points
Commonalities Across Regions:
Key Digital Biomarkers: Sleep patterns, physical activity, and social behavior emerged as universal indicators of mental health.
For researchers and developers: can be interesting reading to get into the details on what specific measurements are useful here as metrics
Cost and Access Challenges: Even in high-income countries like the US and UK, cost remains a barrier, indicating a need for more affordable and accessible solutions.
For developers: how are you ensuring this is accessible, affordable and feasible for where you are deploying?
Importance of Longitudinal Data: Digital mental health solutions should be designed for sustained engagement to maximize their value over time.
For developers: Investing in care and user experience for engagement and adoption at the start will pay off big when you have many people engaged over a long period of time, creating high quality longitudinal data.
Data Privacy Concerns: While there is strong awareness of data privacy risks, individuals trust healthcare professionals with their information.
For researchers and developers: work with both groups to foster trust.
Local Contexts and Nuances:
A video snippet from the podcast highlighting the LMIC context challenges
Community-Based Approaches in LMICs: Greater emphasis on awareness, prevention, and community engagement was observed in lower-income settings. To me this resonates with the episode I did with Jana: he had talked about this being THE ENABLER in Rwanda, and funders recognising the need to solve this as a pre-requisite. If you “add digital” without this, you’re setting up to fail.
To move the needle on outcomes in rural or underserved communities, it is worth STARTING HERE at community and awareness.
Stigma and Cultural Sensitivity: Mental health stigma manifests differently across regions. Digital health tools should be discreet and culturally appropriate. A great example of an insight from this: Lucy mentioned if you have a wearable for mental health - that itself becomes a way to attract stigma: people don’t want to have an outward signal.
For wearables developers to consider: how might we ensure we really understand and in turn avoid exacerbating mental health stigma and other barriers?
Co-Designing with Users: Solutions should be developed with input from target users to ensure they are relevant and effective. If you want an example of how to do this well, listen to this episode with Jana.
Looking ahead
I’m excited to see what other work might spring from this, more funding on this type of work would be wellcome indeed (sorry I couldn’t help it)
We definitely need many more cross-national insights, and we all need a whole bunch of assumptions challenged.
Mental health is an area of massive divides, and whilst theres a whole load of promise that digital can help, we need more work that builds on this if we are to avoid widening these divides. And especially in the current geopolitical landscape.
If you’re building in this space, what are your challenges? What do you need to see more of?
If you found this helpful:
Dive into Lucy and the DiMe team’s full work. This was a short overview from the podcast, and there is clearly much more to extract
Listen to the full podcast episode with Lucy here
Related episode: Listen to my discussion with Jana Alagarajah about co-designing a mental health solution with young people in Rwanda.
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