On June 24th and 25th, Carina Dantas and Andrea Marinho from SHINE 2Europe were in Barcelona to participate in the International Digital Public Health Conference series (DPH).
Representing SHINE and in partnership, they contributed to four sessions of the event: “From Play to Prevention: Building a Digital Developer Hub to Gamify Hygiene and Combat AMR in African and European Schools”, with Lars Münter (Nordic Wellbeing Academy, Denmark); “The Menopause Mission – Digital Empowerment for Healthy Ageing for Women”, also with Lars Münter and also Nina Sønderberg (Nordic Wellbeing Academy, Ireland); “Adapting the Garcia Family personas to specific contexts of three Middle Income Countries | the MULTIPULM experience” and a “Workshop: Human-Centred Design for Digital Public Health in LMICs: A Persona-Based Workshop”.
“The Menopause Mission” addresses an often-overlooked topic in discussions about healthy ageing, workforce participation, and digital inclusion: the impact of menopause on women’s wellbeing, confidence, career progression, and access to opportunities in later life.
As a partner in the HERA – Helping Empower Women through Reskilling and Advancement project, SHINE 2Europe is committed to supporting women aged 45+ through innovative approaches that combine lifelong learning, digital empowerment, community engagement, and policy innovation. HERA aims to reduce gender inequalities by helping women navigate the challenges and opportunities created by the digital and green transitions, while strengthening inclusion, employability, and wellbeing.
The Menopause Mission aligns closely with HERA’s vision. By promoting digital literacy, access to trusted information, peer support, and empowerment throughout key life transitions, initiatives such as this contribute to creating more inclusive societies and healthier ageing trajectories for women. The discussion also reinforced the importance of addressing health, wellbeing, employment, and lifelong learning as interconnected dimensions of active participation in society.
At SHINE, we believe that empowering women is not only about supporting career transitions; it is about creating the conditions for confidence, health, participation, and lifelong growth. Through HERA, we continue working with partners across Europe to co-create solutions that ensure inclusivity in our increasingly digital world.
“Adapting the Garcia Family Personas to Specific Contexts of Three Middle-Income Countries | The MULTIPULM Project Experience” is about one of the recurring challenges in digital public health that is that we often develop solutions with the best scientific knowledge, but not always with sufficient attention to the realities of the people and contexts where they will be implemented.
Personas are valuable tools for human-centred design. They help us understand users, anticipate needs, and guide the development of digital health interventions. But personas are not universal. When transferred across different cultural, social, economic, and health system contexts without careful adaptation, they can unintentionally reinforce assumptions rather than reflect reality.
The work presented, developed within the MULTIPULM project, explores how the People–Activities–Context–Technology (PACT) methodology can be used to systematically adapt the SHAFE Foundation’s Garcia Family personas for three middle-income countries: Brazil, Türkiye, and Serbia. The objective is not simply to “translate” personas, but to understand how local health systems, family structures, digital infrastructure, cultural values, health literacy, and everyday lived experiences influence the way people interact with digital public health solutions. The work reinforces an important message: effective digital health starts with understanding people in context. Human-centred design is only truly human-centred when it embraces cultural diversity and local realities.
In the “Workshop: Human-Centred Design for Digital Public Health in LMICs: A Persona-Based Workshop” we had great participation at the roundtable discussions and pitch speakers.
As digital public health continues to evolve globally, one of the most important questions we face is: how can we ensure that digital solutions are designed with, and for, the people and communities they aim to serve?
The interactive session focused on the use of personas as practical tools for bridging research, policy, and implementation. Inspired by projects such as the MULTIPULM and participants from diverse countries and disciplines, the team explored how personas such as the
SHAFE GARCIA family and the ones from SIRENE project can be adapted to different Low- and Middle-Income Country (LMIC) contexts.
Through collaborative exercises, participants examined how factors such as health system structures, digital infrastructure and access, cultural and family dynamics, gender and social inequalities, health literacy and trust and policy and governance environments shape the design and implementation of digital public health interventions.
Besides the opportunity to learn directly from participants’ lived experiences and professional expertise, there was reflection on the ethical dimensions of persona-based approaches and feedback emerging from projects including myHealth@myHands and CARING-AI particularly in relation to equitable access, digital inclusion, and AI-supported care in multicultural settings.
The DPH2026 is a world leading annual interdisciplinary event on research and innovation in digital public health. Since its establishment in 2008, it has become a well known venue presenting cutting edge interdisciplinary research and innovation driven by real world needs, aiming to improve public health through the application of novel technology at the individual, community and global levels.