ELEARNING AND MOBILE APPS IN PALLIATIVE CARE

Abstract

On one hand, roughly speaking, palliative care is a multidisciplinary approach aiming to improve the quality of life of people facing life-threatening illness, and of their families. As such, it is included -- more or less -- in the health system of each country. On the other hand, due to the increased usage of Internet, mobile phones and tablets, eLearning and mobile applications (in short apps) can effectively improve the quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to identify how palliative care could benefit from those IT tools. The domains of issues associated with illness and bereavement are presented corroborated to appropriates eLearning tools and mobile apps. We survey of the nowadays eLearning tools and mobile apps for palliative care, and propose new ideas for their development in this direction. With this respect, we also mention possibilities of collaboration between IT developers and the specialists in palliation, specifying for each case the specialization needed by each part. Other approaches to these IT tools are given: by their type, by their users, by their specific domains. Much has been done in some parts of the world to improve the palliative care, including the direction of IT; we specify how to make the respective tools useful here and elsewhere. Concluding, the paper can be seen as a collection of descriptions of existing tools, proposed tools, and ideas about making eLearning tools and apps for palliative care useful everywhere. Last but not least, we mention that the eLearning and mobile apps tools considered here are never supposed to substitute the specialist, but to give support to the patient, to the personal care of the patient and/or to the corresponding specialist.