Digital Therapeutics and Digital Twins

Revolutionizing Women’s Mental Health: Data-Driven Care Through Digital Therapeutics and Digital Twins

At the recent CIPSICO Congress, Mential presented a transformative vision for the future of women’s mental health with the session “Digital Therapeutics and Digital Twins: Advances in Data-Driven Women’s Mental Health”. This article summarizes the main scientific insights, technological innovations, and clinical applications of our model—a pioneering effort to create a new standard in precision mental healthcare for women.

The Problem: A Healthcare System Not Designed for Women’s Mental Health

It is no longer a secret that the current healthcare system fails to adequately address the mental health needs of women. Globally, women experience significantly higher rates of:

• Anxiety disorders (twice the prevalence of men) ,
• Depression (50% more common in women),
• Perinatal mental health problems (up to 20% prevalence),
• Chronic pain syndromes (e.g., fibromyalgia, endometriosis, migraines), and
• Emotional dysregulation linked to hormonal transitions (menstrual cycle, perimenopause, menopause).

Despite this, women are still managed under generic mental health protocols, primarily based on male-centric data and symptom presentations. Mential’s innovation is to bridge this gap by tailoring digital mental health care for women, using advanced data-driven models.

The Mential Model: Combining Digital Twins and Digital Therapeutics

At the core of our model are two technological innovations:

1. Digital Twin Technology (DT)

A Digital Twin (DT) is a continuously updated virtual representation of the patient’s psychological and behavioral state. It evolves with every patient interaction, enabling:

• Continuous diagnosis,
• Personalized care plans, and
• Dynamic treatment adjustments.

Mential’s DT model integrates:

• Symptom reports,
• Behavioral and lifestyle data (physical activity, sleep, nutrition),
• Contextual data (social relationships, work status, hormonal cycles),
• Biological markers (self-reported or wearables), and
• Real-time interaction data from digital interventions.

2. Digital Therapeutics (DTx)

Digital Therapeutics are clinically validated digital interventions designed to prevent, manage, or treat mental health conditions. Mential’s DTx programs deliver:

• Evidence-based interventions (CBT, ACT, DBT, Mindfulness, Positive Psychology),
• Semi-structured conversational exercises using generative AI,
• Daily goal tracking and habit formation modules,
• Adaptive difficulty levels based on patient progress, and
• Clinical oversight, with therapists monitoring digital twin data in real time.

By combining DT and DTx, Mential enables data-driven, scalable, and hyper-personalized care pathways, especially tailored to the complex symptomatology of women.

The Scientific Foundation: Precision Mental Health for Women

The Gender Gap in Mental Health Research

Extensive literature shows gender-specific patterns in:

• Symptom expression (women tend to exhibit more internalizing symptoms) ,
• Emotional regulation strategies (greater ruminative styles in women),
• Social determinants (greater exposure to caregiving burdens and gender-based discrimination).

Yet, most digital interventions today are gender-neutral, missing the unique biopsychosocial reality of women.

Mential’s Approach

Our platform incorporates over 1000 patient markers—structured according to the FHIR standard, in four key dimensions :

1. Socio-demographic factors (life context, support networks),
2. Mind and cognition (anxiety, depression, cognitive distortions),
3. Body and health (sleep, nutrition, hormones, physical activity),
4. Behavior and habits (functioning in social, work, and family environments).

This ensures that each patient’s treatment plan is built around their personal history, hormonal cycles, and current mental state, rather than a rigid diagnostic label.

Continuous Diagnosis: Moving Beyond Static Labels

In traditional care, diagnosis is a one-off event. Mential replaces this with continuous assessment, meaning:

• The diagnosis evolves,
• The interventions adjust dynamically,
• Early signs of deterioration or relapse are detected before symptoms escalate.

This is operationalized through:

• Structured symptom questionnaires,
• Ecological momentary assessments (EMAs),
• Digital behavioral data (app usage, activity levels, interaction patterns).

By continuously comparing the patient’s digital twin to healthy trajectories or risk profiles, we can proactively recommend interventions or escalate care when needed.

Data-Driven Personalization: AI That Knows You

Mential uses multiple AI engines:

• Predictive AI to forecast clinical risks (e.g., depressive relapses),
• Prescriptive AI to recommend the next-best therapeutic action,
• Generative AI to deliver personalized micro-interventions,
• Explainable AI to provide therapists with clear, transparent decision support.

Every patient interaction feeds back into the system, improving the accuracy of predictions and the efficacy of interventions.

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The Impact: Transforming Women’s Mental Health Care at Scale

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Compared to traditional care, the Mential model offers several distinct advantages.

In terms of diagnosis speed, traditional systems often take several weeks or even months to reach a diagnosis, whereas Mential provides continuous and dynamic diagnostic updates based on real-time data.

Personalization in standard care typically relies on fixed diagnostic labels, while Mential personalizes treatment based on the patient’s evolving symptoms, daily behaviors, and contextual factors.

Regarding therapist workload, traditional care involves high levels of manual data collection and interpretation, which can be time-consuming. In contrast, Mential significantly reduces therapist load by providing AI-driven summaries and data visualizations.

When it comes to patient engagement, traditional therapy often suffers from low adherence rates, with approximately 50% of patients dropping out of treatment. Mential’s system, by offering personalized, engaging, and flexible interventions, achieves adherence rates exceeding 75%.

Time to clinical improvement is also markedly shorter. Conventional therapy typically requires 10 to 15 sessions to observe significant changes, while Mential patients often experience noticeable improvements within just 4 to 8 weeks.

Finally, the overall focus of care is different. Traditional models concentrate on treating disorders based on diagnostic categories, whereas Mential’s approach emphasizes overall well-being, proactive symptom management, and prevention, creating a more holistic and patient-centered care experien
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Key Differentiator: AI is Used With Supervision

Unlike standalone chatbot apps, Mential always keeps a licensed clinical psychologist supervising the case, ensuring:

• No patient is left without human support,
• Interventions remain clinically safe,
• The AI learns ethically and responsibly.

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Mential’s approach showcased at CIPSICO represents a paradigm shift: from static, diagnosis-driven care to dynamic, symptom-centered, data-driven mental health support. By combining the power of Digital Therapeutics with continuous Digital Twin updates, Mential ensures that every woman can receive personalized, evidence-based, and clinically supervised mental health care—whenever and wherever she needs it.

This is not just innovation—it’s a much-needed correction to decades of neglect in women’s mental health research and care.

https://cipsico.org/ponencia/digital-therapeutics-and-digital-twins-advances-in-data-driven-womens-mental-health/

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