Daniela Lira, a psychologist and doctoral researcher at the Millennium Nucleus Imhay, is leading the development of a mobile application that aims to achieve greater adherence to treatments through the co-design of the App with the users themselves. This initiative, a central part of her doctoral thesis work, is also being carried out within the framework of the national and international digital health network of which Imhay is a member.

Imhay’s doctoral researcher, Daniela Lira is doing her doctoral thesis on how to use computer or mobile applications to enhance prevention strategies for depression and anxiety in the university population.

One of the symbolic projects of the Millennium Nucleus Imhay has been the Cuida tu Ánimo program, a digital intervention strategy to prevent and intervene in a timely manner in depression and suicide risk in adolescents and young people. Based on its positive results, the researchers who make up the work team decided to expand the experience and test it on university students, with the adaptations and changes pertinent to this population group.

The project is part of the thesis that psychologist Daniela Lira is developing, a student of the Doctorate in Psychotherapy offered jointly by the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She has been a doctoral researcher at Imhay since 2020, when she did a research internship with Dr. Vania Martínez, director of the Millennium Nucleus, «to see how they work here… and I never left,» says Daniela.

Daniela Lira focused her doctoral thesis on how to use personal digital technologies, such as computer or cell phone applications, to enhance prevention strategies for depression and anxiety.

This work that the psychologist is carrying out is part of the World Mental Health International College Student Initiative (WMH-ICS), an initiative of the World Health Organization, led by Harvard University, and also of the Network for the Development of Digital Mental Health in Chile. Both collaborative bodies carry out interdisciplinary research for the implementation of technological solutions in the prevention, detection, and treatment of mental disorders in the university population.

«We had students testing the application, and then, in addition to the instruments that we passed them at the level of a test or psychometric scale, we also interviewed them to delve into some of the results we found. The idea was not to stay only with numerical data but also with a qualitative approach to have a new perspective or some new indicator that guides our work,» explains the Imhay doctoral researcher.

A few weeks ago, Daniela returned from Germany, where she spent three months doing an internship at the Psychotherapy Research Center of the Heidelberg University Hospital, an institution with which the Millennium Nucleus Imhay has collaboration ties.

«The two researchers who lead this German psychotherapy research center have researched together with Vania Martínez and were also part of the development of Cuida tu Ánimo, so they are well involved in this topic,» explains the young psychologist. «I went to learn more directly about the work they are currently carrying out, but it was also a great opportunity for them to contribute to my research.»

What are your feelings at this point in your work on the topic of digital health?

«I still think that this type of preventive intervention can have a very high impact, especially considering that today’s youth are very connected to the digital world. But there is still a lot of work to be done to understand more deeply how we can make these prevention strategies, of which we have evidence that they work, so that they are effectively used by the target audience.