Dr Shruti Raghuraman

Dr Shruti Raghuraman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Exeter. She is a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher whose work sits at the intersection of digital health, health equity, and the evaluation of complex interventions in health and social care. Drawing on qualitative and realist-informed methodologies, her research focuses on designing, adapting and evaluating interventions that are equitable, culturally responsive and ready for real-world implementation, with a particular emphasis on underserved communities.

She is currently involved in two digital health projects. PUREMIND is a Horizon Europe-funded project developing an Integrated Mental Healthcare Ecosystem to predict and prevent mental health disorders in neurodivergent children, adolescents and young adults. The project integrates environmental, biological and behavioural data to deliver personalised interventions through an AI-powered digital twin and mobile application, supporting early detection and self-regulation of symptoms.

She is also working on AdapteD:REACH-HF, funded by the LEAP Digital Health Hub, which involves adapting a digital cardiac rehabilitation programme to enhance usability, accessibility and cultural inclusivity for South Asian communities. The project adopts a dyadic approach informed by Human-Computer Interaction principles and integrates cultural and relational factors to improve engagement and health outcomes, particularly among older adults who are often underrepresented in digital health research.

Across these roles, Shruti oversees the end-to-end research process, ensuring rigorous and compliant delivery from initial design through to implementation, analysis and dissemination. She works closely with interdisciplinary research teams, clinicians, Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) contributors, and digital health developers to ensure that interventions are person-centred and implementation-ready. Across both projects, she is developing structured and innovative PPIE strategies to embed meaningful involvement throughout the research lifecycle, ensuring that intervention design and delivery are informed by lived experience and reflective of community priorities.

Previously, she led the development of the programme theory for the NIHR-funded RecoverED intervention using realist-informed methods and contributed to the development of the community-based rehabilitation intervention designed to support recovery from delirium in older adults. Co-designed with individuals with lived experience, the intervention was tested in a multi-site feasibility trial across the UK. She led the embedded process evaluation, assessing implementation fidelity, acceptability and participant engagement to inform future scale-up and sustainable delivery, and has published extensively on this work.

Shruti holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Nottingham. Her doctoral research examined the lived experiences of domestic violence amond South Indian women and culturally responsive therapeutic approaches to PTSD in non-Western settings, shaping her ongoing interest in cross-cultural research and equitable intervention design.

Her long-term research focuses on advancing health equity in digital health and wider health systems through meaningful community involvement in research, amplifying underserved voices, and ensuring that intervention design and evaluation are grounded in the needs and priorities of populations who are often underrepresented in health research.