IManageCancer: developing a platform for empowering patients and strengthening self-management in cancer diseases

Cancer research has led to more cancer patients being cured, and many more enabled to live with their cancer. As such, some cancers are now considered a chronic disease, where patients and their families face the challenge to take an active role in their own care and in some cases in their treatment. To this direction the iManageCancer project aims to provide a cancer specific self-management platform designed according to the needs of patient groups while focusing, in parallel, on the wellbeing of the cancer patient. In this paper, we present the use-case requirements collected using a survey, a workshop and the analysis of three white papers and then we explain the corresponding system architecture. We describe in detail the main technological components of the designed platform, show the current status of development and we discuss further directions of research

Patient empowerment for cancer patients through a novel ICT infrastructure

As a result of recent advances in cancer research and “precision medicine” approaches, i.e. the idea of treating each patient with the right drug at the right time, more and more cancer patients are being cured, or might have to cope with a life with cancer. For many people, cancer survival today means living with a complex and chronic condition. Surviving and living with or beyond cancer requires the long-term management of the disease, leading to a significant need for active rehabilitation of the patients. In this paper, we present a novel methodology employed in the iManageCancer project for cancer patient empowerment in which personal health systems, serious games, psychoemotional monitoring and other novel decision-support tools are combined into an integrated patient empowerment platform. We present in detail the ICT infrastructure developed and our evaluation with the involvement of cancer patients on two sites, a large-scale pilot for adults and a small-scale test for children. The evaluation showed mixed evidences on the improvement of patient empowerment, while ability to cope with cancer, including improvement in mood and resilience to cancer, increased for the participants of the adults′ pilot