A Secure Occupational Therapy Framework for Monitoring Cancer Patients’ Quality of Life

Abstract

Once diagnosed with cancer, a patient goes through a series of diagnosis and tests, which are referred to as “after cancer treatment”. Due to the nature of the treatment and side effects, maintaining quality of life (QoL) in the home environment is a challenging task. Sometimes, a cancer patient’s situation changes abruptly as the functionality of certain organs deteriorates, which affects their QoL. One way of knowing the physiological functional status of a cancer patient is to design an occupational therapy. In this paper, we propose a blockchain and off-chain-based framework, which will allow multiple medical and ambient intelligent Internet of Things sensors to capture the QoL information from one’s home environment and securely share it with their community of interest. Using our proposed framework, both transactional records and multimedia big data can be shared with an oncologist or palliative care unit for real-time decision support. We have also developed blockchain-based data analytics, which will allow a clinician to visualize the immutable history of the patient’s data available from an in-home secure monitoring system for a better understanding of a patient’s current or historical states. Finally, we will present our current implementation status, which provides significant encouragement for further development.

A Review of AI and Data Science Support for Cancer Management

“…The third group of systems includes solutions where multiple sensors are used in order to collect the required information. Rahman et al [26] presented a Secure Occupational Therapy (OT) Framework, which aims at HRQoL monitoring. The proposed system uses multiple sensors to detect activities of daily life.…”

“…PROs were added to this table when used in 3 or more papers. In this review, the most commonly used validated PRO questionnaire for collecting HRQoL data is the EORTC QLQ-C30, used in 28% of the 50 included papers [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. It is a European widely used core generic questionnaire for cancer patients, and comprises most dimensions of wellbeing as described by Linton et al [6], excluding spiritual wellbeing and personal circumstances.…”

“…Solutions that are more complex measure heart rate, oxygen saturation [43] or weight, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, pulse and temperature [45]. There are also Kinect-based solutions, which can help patients to perform the recommended physical exercises [15,44].…”

Radar-based hierarchical human activity classification

“…Elderly care or assisted living for human activity monitoring has attracted much interest in maintaining people at home longer. The primary care units are not designed to take care of chronic patients in high numbers, and for less concerning situations that require monitoring but not hospitalisation, there is interest in monitoring people remotely at their homes [1][2][3]. The primary function is to detect critical events such as fall and alert carers for a swift response to the emergency [4].…”

Using Visualization to Build Transparency in a Healthcare Blockchain Application

“…This means that patient data are generated by multiple stakeholder systems (partners and patients) that use several advanced technologies, such as internet of things (IoT), mobile apps, digital exchanges, and social media, and such data have to be understood, collected, integrated, and shared by all involved in the support of patient care. Unless there is a public health crisis (e.g., that calls for public health agencies to coordinate significant disruptions to economic, health, and social conditions [12], opioid addiction that calls for tracking drug distribution [13], or chronic care management of high risk patients to reduce hospital readmissions [14][15][16], there is little incentive for hospitals to coordinate patient data sharing outside their hospital networks. This calls for a distributed digital platform that is either coordinated by a trusted third party or an architecture that ensures trust for everyone to contribute and use the data shared.…”