The evidence that quality of life is a positive variable for the survival of cancer patients has prompted the interest of the health and pharmaceutical industry in considering that variable as a final clinical outcome. Sustained improvements in cancer care in recent years have resulted in increased numbers of people living with and beyond cancer, with increased attention being placed on improving quality of life for those individuals. Connected Health provides the foundations for the transformation of cancer care into a patient-centric model, focused on providing fully connected, personalized support and therapy for the unique needs of each patient. Connected Health creates an opportunity to overcome barriers to health care support among patients diagnosed with chronic conditions. This paper provides an overview of important areas for the foundations of the creation of a new Connected Health paradigm in cancer care. Here we discuss the capabilities of mobile and wearable technologies; we also discuss pervasive and persuasive strategies and device systems to provide multidisciplinary and inclusive approaches for cancer patients for mental well-being, physical activity promotion, and rehabilitation. Several examples already show that there is enthusiasm in strengthening the possibilities offered by Connected Health in persuasive and pervasive technology in cancer care. Developments harnessing the Internet of Things, personalization, patient-centered design, and artificial intelligence help to monitor and assess the health status of cancer patients. Furthermore, this paper analyses the data infrastructure ecosystem for Connected Health and its semantic interoperability with the Connected Health economy ecosystem and its associated barriers. Interoperability is essential when developing Connected Health solutions that integrate with health systems and electronic health records. Given the exponential business growth of the Connected Health economy, there is an urgent need to develop mHealth (mobile health) exponentially, making it both an attractive and challenging market. In conclusion, there is a need for user-centered and multidisciplinary standards of practice to the design, development, evaluation, and implementation of Connected Health interventions in cancer care to ensure their acceptability, practicality, feasibility, effectiveness, affordability, safety, and equity.

Mobile applications often adapt their behavior according to user context, however, they are often limited to consider few sources of contextual information, such as user position or language. This article reviews existing work in context-aware systems (CAS), e.g., how to model context, and discusses further development of CAS and its potential applications by looking at available information, methods and technologies. Social Media seems to be an interesting source of personal information when appropriately exploited. In addition, there are many types of general information, ranging from weather and public transport to information of books and museums. These information sources can be combined in previously unexplored ways, enabling the development of smarter mobile services in different domains. Users are, however, reluctant to provide their personal information to applications; therefore, there is a crave for new regulations and systems that allow applications to use such contextual data without compromising the user privacy.

Acknowledging the user context, e.g., position and activity, provides a natural way to adapt applications according to the user needs. How to actually capture and exploit context, however, is not self-evident and it is tempting to assign the related responsibilities to individual context-consuming applications. Unfortunately, this confuses the user, complicates application development and hinders context-aware semantic computing as a research discipline. In this article, we outline context-aware semantic computing research topics and the state-of-the-art mobile application development frameworks of special interest to us, acknowledging best practices for accessing and modeling sensor context. From the integrated point of view, context-aware semantic computing is demonstrated in terms of a software component called context engine. In order to better understand how theory is tied with practice, we also introduce a simple context engine prototype. Finally, we use the research background and the empirical setting to discuss the significant problems and relevant research directions in context-aware semantic processing.

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Quality of life (QoL) indicators are now being adopted as clinical outcomes in clinical trials on cancer treatments. Technology-free daily monitoring of patients is complicated, time-consuming and expensive due to the need for vast amounts of resources and personnel. The alternative method of using the patients’ own phones could reduce the burden of continuous monitoring of cancer patients in clinical trials. This paper proposes monitoring the patients’ QoL by gathering data from their own phones. We considered that the continuous multiparametric acquisition of movement, location, phone calls, conversations and data use could be employed to simultaneously monitor their physical, psychological, social and environmental aspects. An open access phone app was developed (Human Dynamics Reporting Service (HDRS)) to implement this approach. We here propose a novel mapping between the standardized QoL items for these patients, the European Organization for the Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire (EORTC QLQ-C30) and define HDRS monitoring indicators. A pilot study with university volunteers verified the plausibility of detecting human activity indicators directly related to QoL.

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Chronic pain is one of the most common health problems affecting daily activity, employment, relationships and emotional functioning. Unfortunately, the lack of specialized health care personnel, and the high heterogeneity in terms of clinical manifestation and treatment results contribute in failure to manage efficiently and effectively pain. Information and communication technology (ICT) can be a valuable tool, enabling patients and healthcare professional empowerment and better self-management of pain. To this direction, this article reports on the design of a novel technical infrastructure to support effectively and efficiently chronic pain management, based on an Intelligent Personal Health Record platform on top of already available ICT tools. The designed platform targets, among others, at improving the knowledge on the patient data, effectiveness and adherence to treatment and providing effective communication channels between patients and healthcare professionals.