An mHealth system for toxicity monitoring of paediatric oncological patients using Near Field Communication technology

Abstract

Home-based monitoring might be useful to reduce the burden of long-lasting oncological treatment for children. Current telemonitoring applications focus on chronic diseases or elderly people. Based on the workflow for different stakeholders and the identification of parameters important in paediatric oncology, we developed a prototype of a smartphone-based telehealth system using Near Field Communication technology for monitoring paediatric neuroblastoma patients at home. The parameters blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, body weight, C-reactive protein, white blood cell count, wellbeing, pain level, nausea level and skin alterations could be monitored using a smartphone, a designated app, point-of-care measurement devices and a smart-poster containing RFID tags. The system has been designed to increase the quality of life for paediatric cancer patients. As a future step, a clinical trial is currently being planned to evaluate the system in clinical setting.

Using digital health to facilitate compliance with standardized pediatric cancer treatment guidelines in Tanzania: protocol for an early-stage effectiveness-implementation hybrid study

“…In addition to the impact on protocol-driven treatment, digital health applications have been applied in low-resource settings to facilitate task shifting, improve work planning and coordination between providers, as well as enhance the performance of health workers [12][13][14][15]. These data support the use of digital health applications to improve compliance with protocol-driven treatment [16][17][18].…”

Perspective: Wearable Internet of Medical Things for Remote Tracking of Symptoms, Prediction of Health Anomalies, Implementation of Preventative Measures, and Control of Virus Spread During the Era of COVID-19

“…From a communication standpoint, in wearable IoMT devices, near field connection (NFC) (Neefs et al, 2010 ; Opperman and Hancke, 2011 ; Timalsina et al, 2012 ; Duregger et al, 2015 ), Bluetooth connection (Lee et al, 2007 ; Dementyev et al, 2013 ), and WiFi (Lee et al, 2007 ; Curone et al, 2010 ; Kim et al, 2015 ) are used based on their data transfer rate, range of communication capability, power consumption, and availability. Some of these communication modalities are also used for localization, as explained later.…”

Integration of advances in social media and mHealth technology are pivotal to successful cancer prevention and control

“…The technology was successfully used by the same group to measure patient toxicities at home in paediatric oncology patients with the goal of improving quality of life for these patients. This approach allowed them (where appropriate) to have chemotherapy at home and avoid the hospital setting while being carefully monitored for toxicity with near field communication technology (42).…”