Ubiquitous Assessment of the Recovery of Cancer Patients Using Consumer-Level Activity Trackers

Abstract

Performance Status (PS) variability is a powerful tool to evaluate overall condition, treatment needs and survival chances of cancer patients. Traditionally, its assessment has relied on the experience of oncologists when interpreting results of clinical tests and when interviewing the patients. Meanwhile, consumer-level activity trackers have obtained good results in behavior-change oriented intervention trials and Fitbit devices have demonstrated enough reliability to provide objective data related to physical activity, but the clinical possibilities of the data collected has been neglected. This work presents a system design for ubiquitous assessment of PS by means of objective and quantifiable data from different sources: medical history, self-reported quality-of-life questionnaires and a commercial activity tracker Fitbit Alta HR. The system proposed aims to contextualize and model the recovery process of breast cancer patients during chemotherapy treatment.