The first year of the project focused on the definition of the concept for cancer patient empowerment and on the design of the iManageCancer Platform. Then, the efforts in the following 18 months concentrated on the development of the various technological tools planned and their integration in a holistic platform. Software development was driven by a close involvement of end users, in particular patients, through various activities. An initial prototype of the iManageCancer Platform offering basic functionality was delivered in December 2016 followed by a first formal end user workshop, achieving an important milestone (MS2) with this activity. The extended version of the integrated platform became available on July 2017 and was tested by 10 patients at home over a week.
The iManageCancer Platform consists of the applications iPHR, MyHealthAvatar for iManageCancer, iManageMyHealth, iSupportMyPatients as well as the Game for Kids and the Game for Adults. They are all connected to a backbone of services comprising of a semantic data store, the Care Flow Engine with the Model Repository, and an authentication service.
iPHR, an open source personal health record available online, enables an individual to manage and share a digital copy of his/her health and contains a variety of applications, such as an e-diary, novel psycho-emotional health assessment instruments, a personal health information recommender, and a decision aid for prostate cancer patients.
MyHealthAvatar for iManageCancer supports patients with cancer to optimize their lifestyle and to recover from cancer treatment, through an integrated digital representation of the personal health status.
The iManageMyHealth app supports users in managing their drugs and their interactions. It assists in managing and understanding paper based health documents, and in recording and overviewing specific vital signs and laboratory parameters. Specific management services of the Care Flow Engine, record pain and fatigue and offer advices and links to public information resources.
iSupportMyPatients is an informative app intended for physicians. This app offers to health professionals access to the disease management services of the Care Flow Engine. It includes monitoring serious side effects of chemotherapies, leveraging a predictive risk model for febrile neutropenia, and obtaining advice regarding the optimal therapy. This prognostic model, implementing a pre-treatment model, resulted from machine learning research in the project on existing cancer data from chemotherapy patients in the.
The Serious Game for Adults promotes a healthier lifestyle, disease management and encourages patients to manage their disease. The game puts the users in the role of an authority figure who manages a town, trying to balance residents’ resources and time to face cancer related lifestyle problems.
The Serious Game for Kids is a classical shooter game on cancer cells with strong social aspects. It can also be played by family members and friends to give the child support in form of extra weapons and shields to fight the cancer.
The project conducted three pilots, one for adult breast cancer patients, one for prostate cancer patients, and one for cancer suffering children and their parents to assess the value of the iManageCancer Platform. The pilot for kids managed to recruit 15 parents and their children whereas the pilots for adults managed to recruit 135 patients. Results showed mixed evidences on the improvements for the patient empowerment due to lack of time and treatment induced stress and psychological problems. Nevertheless coping with cancer, mood and cancer resilience were improved for the trial arm using the platform. In addition, users recognized the usability and the usefulness of the developed platform. With these results, the final milestone (MS4) of the project is achieved.
Project results attracted more than 75K visitors in the YouTube channel, more than 150K visitors per month, a special issue in a well-respected journal and 42 peer-reviewed scientific papers and articles whereas project results disseminated widely through multiple marketing campaigns. Finally multiple exploitation routes were explored for the 14 exploitable technological innovations identified both academic and commercial.
