Building and operating a research-led harm-reduction platform

Context

MyUSE is a digital health intervention for drug harm reduction among university students. It grew out of academic research at University College Cork. The engineering work involved translating that research into a product students could use, while giving the research team a way to maintain and develop the intervention over time.

The product brought together web and mobile delivery, structured intervention content and university stakeholders. The implementation had to support the intervention, make it accessible and take care over how people interacted with it and how their data was handled.

My role

As founding engineer and technical lead, I built and operated the platform, owning architecture, implementation and production rollout. I worked with psychologists and university stakeholders to translate their requirements into software. My contribution covered the engineering and product implementation; the intervention and its research foundations were the work of the wider team.

My responsibilities also included product design, stakeholder collaboration, user research and privacy documentation. I wrote and maintained the Data Protection Impact Assessment as the platform and its data flows evolved, bringing that work into the same development process as the application.

Constraints and requirements

Research-led content changes as an intervention develops. MyUSE also involved people from different disciplines who needed to contribute to the same product. The engineering challenge was to let researchers maintain and develop intervention content while application development continued. Changes to the research material and changes to the software needed to progress alongside each other.

What I built

I built the platform using Vue/Nuxt, Laravel and AWS, including a CMS that researchers could use to update intervention content. The CMS let researchers change intervention content without developer involvement. The editorial interface supported parallel work across disciplines and helped clarify technical requirements, as described in our 2020 conference abstract. The research also describes an algorithm that allocated users to personalised intervention components in the early prototype, connecting the digital implementation to the intervention design.

The work included web and mobile delivery, accessibility design and implementation, and a separate database per client. Focus groups, usability testing and A/B testing informed delivery. Privacy-by-design architecture and data-lifecycle planning developed alongside the application, with the DPIA updated as the implementation changed. Each institution had its own content, branding and modules, supported by an onboarding and migration process. Bundle and media optimisation, lazy loading, caching and leaner API endpoints brought Lighthouse performance and accessibility scores to 100.

Result

The platform grew to more than 10,000 registered users. MyUSE was selected as the digital tool for ESHEILD, a Department of Health-funded programme launched at UCC in 2025 to bring the intervention to six Irish higher education institutions. The project has continued to grow at myuse.ie. I was first author of the 2020 conference abstract on the CMS approach and co-authored work on the intervention algorithm, harm-reduction approach and accessibility. These provide public evidence of the project and its development approach, alongside the product itself at myuse.ie.

• Implemented privacy-by-design architecture and data-lifecycle planning
• Delivered the product across web and mobile
• Published accessibility design and implementation work as second author
• Used focus groups, usability testing, and A/B testing to inform delivery