Abstract
Quality of life (QoL) indicators are now being adopted as clinical outcomes in clinical trials on cancer treatments. Technology-free daily monitoring of patients is complicated, time-consuming and expensive due to the need for vast amounts of resources and personnel. The alternative method of using the patients’ own phones could reduce the burden of continuous monitoring of cancer patients in clinical trials. This paper proposes monitoring the patients’ QoL by gathering data from their own phones. We considered that the continuous multiparametric acquisition of movement, location, phone calls, conversations and data use could be employed to simultaneously monitor their physical, psychological, social and environmental aspects. An open access phone app was developed (Human Dynamics Reporting Service (HDRS)) to implement this approach. We here propose a novel mapping between the standardized QoL items for these patients, the European Organization for the Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ-C30) and define HDRS monitoring indicators. A pilot study with university volunteers verified the plausibility of detecting human activity indicators directly related to QoL.
Highlights
Smartphones currently represent a significant and growing presence in people’s daily lives worldwide
A recent study showed the feasibility of using passively collected mobile phone keyboard metadata to predict signs of manic depression via clinician-administered rating scales [10]. This could be promising for cancer patients, due to the prevalence of depression in this group [11]. In this context we developed the Human Dynamics Reporting Service (HDRS) and here propose it as a mHealth solution to assist cancer patients
This section gives the results obtained from the pilot study with the HDRS application
Summary
Smartphones currently represent a significant and growing presence in people’s daily lives worldwide. The number of phone users in the world is forecast to grow from 2.1 billion in 2016 to around 2.5 billion in 2019. With 80% of all phones sales, leads the market. Many phones are equipped with various sensors, including accelerometers, Wi-Fi, light and temperature sensors, gyroscopes, barometers, etc. These sensors have become rich data sources for measuring various aspects of the user’s daily life. The typical physical activities include walking, jogging, sitting, etc. Due to their unobtrusiveness, low or no installation cost, and being easy to use, phones are becoming the leading platform for human activity recognition [3]
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