A digital guardian angel enhancing cancer patient’s wellbeing and health status improvement following treatment.

Project Information

ONCORELIEF

Grant agreement ID: 875392

DOI

10.3030/875392

Project closed

EC signature date 5 November 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Health, demographic change and well-being

Total cost

€ 4 872 250,00

EU contribution

€ 4 872 250,00

Coordinated by

EXUS SOFTWARE LTD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ONCORELIEF (A digital guardian angel enhancing cancer patient’s wellbeing and health status improvement following treatment.)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In a situation where the number of cancer patients is predicted to increase but resources available for treatment and care are not expected to grow, digital solutions such as PROMs and PREMs that have the potential to improve the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of care are welcomed by many healthcare professionals. Understanding the patient experience is particularly important within cancer care, as cancer patients go through substantial physical, mental and social consequences of both the disease itself and its treatment. Despite time spent in hospital during active cancer care, much of the treatment side effects and treatment-related symptom burden occur outside the hospital.
A huge unprecedented opportunity is formed to create intelligent healthcare-patient services and tools to manage the health status and wellbeing of cancer patients at all levels. This is true, especially when considering the following key driving factors: (1) Improved cancer survival rate; (2) Proliferation of smartphones; (3) Increased importance of health-related quality of life (HRQOL), (4) Huge volumes of data from clinical, administrative, imaging and omics sources (5) Incoming flood of electronic patient reported outcome and experience measures (ePRO), patient internet activities, sensors and monitoring data and (6) Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data analytics.

ONCORELIEF will leverage the above 6 drivers. New approaches will be developed that will allow the utilization of big datasets in order to develop a user-centred AI system, facilitating the integration of quality of life assessment instruments through the use of PROMs and PREMs, aiming to improve post-treatment health status, wellbeing, and follow-up care of cancer patients in order to meet their needs. This will be achieved through an intuitive smart digital assistant (Guardian Angel), able to utilize big data analytics to provide personalized support in post-treatment activities and tasks, suggest actions regarding the patients’ overall health-status, improved QoL and WB and active health-care and ultimately maintain him/her engaged on a wellness journey that will safeguard his/her health over the foreseeable prolonged post-cancer treatment period.
The ONCORELIEF vision is realized through a multi- and trans-disciplinary user-centric approach with concrete technical and scientific objectives (O) and builds upon the following five pillars:
Pillar 1: Analysis of clinical settings, treatment parameters and environment dynamics and driving forces of cancer patient wellbeing
Pillar 2: Exploiting Big Data and AI capabilities for holistic post-treatment insights generation
Pillar 3: Development of innovative technological elements for providing personalized wellbeing
Pillar 4: Piloting in different cancer types and patient-environment settings
Pillar 5: Active engagement of stakeholders resulting to measurable impacts

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ONCORELIEF is a project that developed a solution aiming to support cancer survivors. This solution, titled the Integrated ONCORELIEF solution, incorporates the following results:
- The SmarKo wearable device: It is a wearable in the form of a smartwatch that incorporates a number of sensors, allowing it to capture various types of data and transmit them to a connected mobile phone. As part of the Integrated ONCORELIEF solution, the SmarKo wearable is able to capture health-related data such as the heart rate of a patient, motion data used for the identification of sleeping patterns, and also for the identification of physical activities.
- The ONCORELIEF mobile application: It is a mobile application for Android and IOS mobile phones. It plays a triple role as part of the ONCORELIEF suite, as a) it is the sink for data created by the SmarKo wearable. As such, it includes the APIs for the reception of data through Bluetooth, b) it is the interface through which patients can view their collected data, and also respond to questionnaires, and c) it is the place where recommendations suggested by clinicians are provided to patients.
- The ONCORELIEF back-end framework: It includes all services that have been developed to authenticate users, securely store and transfer data, pre-process data making them digestible by the downstream AI services, and process them through the AI services.
- The clinical decision support web application: This is the web application through which clinicians are able to view patients’ data, their responses to questionnaires, indices related to their quality of life, the cluster they have been classified in based on their condition and symptoms, and provide recommendations to patients.
- The AI research engine: This is the web application providing researchers with secondary access to collected data. It provides an interface for the creation of user-defined workflows, through which processing and visualization of data can be automated and streamlined. Being FHIR-compatible, the AI research engine can process not only the datasets created by ONCORELIEF, but also any other dataset that is compliant with the FHIR protocol.
The user friendliness and performance of these results were evaluated in a clinical study conducted in two clinical centres. The project has published 4 publications in scientific journals and 6 publications in scientific conferences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ONCORELIEF extended the state-of-the-art in big data analytics for improving cancer patients' everyday life and health status, by bringing together big data from a wide range of sources with data produced by wearable sensors. This allowed for an unprecedented level of personalised information to become available to patients, accessible through the Guardian Angel mobile application. On another front, ONCORELIEF advanced the state of the art in mHealth applications for cancer treatment by: i) Placing data privacy and security in the forefront. Extra attention was paid in the anonymisation of user data. Furthermore, privacy-sensitive algorithms will be executed locally on the user’s mobile phone. ii) Exploiting data created by a wide range of compatible sensors. Besides the wearables developed in the framework of the ONCORELIEF project, the developed system is designed to be compatible with products from all major wearable companies. This ensures that a breadth of data will be available for processing and extraction of insights. iii) Only with explicit consent from the user will his/her data be sent to the ONCORELIEF back-end servers for further processing. Proper anonymisation practices will be employed to remove any kind of identity-specific information from data. Last but not least, ONCORELIEF will use data integration techniques assisted by semantic enrichment hand-by-hand with big data analytics tools, creating an environment that will enable multisource big data analytics with minimal overhead in resources and manpower required. Moreover, as big data visualisations are generic-purpose tools that do not cover some of the most advanced needs for visualisation in personal health activities, ONCORELIEF will offer extended support for visualisations, using existing health data to make the process of creating and displaying the visualisation to users more comprehensive to raise their status awareness levels.
ONCORELIEF has evaluated the feasibility of an AI-based solution on supporting cancer survivors. This will open the road for its uptake by hospitals and cancer clinics around Europe.

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