ONCORELIEF Project Objectives

Analysis of clinical settings, treatment parameters and environment dynamics and driving forces of cancer patient wellbeing

ONCORELIEF will adopt a user-centred approach (see also Pillar 5), placing the patient at the centre of the posttreatment ecosystem and analysing the parameters that affect his/her wellbeing and health status within the everyday environment (i.e. personal, social, working, etc.), resulting to the effective design of the ONCORELIEF solution. This pillar consists of the following objectives:

• Objective 1.1: To thoroughly analyse clinical settings at diagnosis, treatment and after-treatment level in conjunction with environmental parameters affecting the health status, the QoL and WB of a cancer patient focusing on the parameters of both external and personal space affecting the long-term effects of cancer treatment.
• Objective 1.2: To analyse oncology-related socio-cultural and psychological factors of personal WB and QoL focusing on the patient’s everyday routine and their needs, during and after treatment.
• Objective 1.3: To record and analyse the needs of cancer-patients regarding their everyday life and activities, perceived WB, environment and after-cure improvement short- and mid-term.
• Objective 1.4: To incorporate health law and GDPR aspects in user requirements in order for the solution developed to be both ethically and legally compliant.
• Objective 1.5: To define the technology interventions positively impacting the everyday life of a cancer patient through which the project scenarios of use will be defined.

Exploiting Big Data and AI capabilities for holistic post-treatment insights generation

Amongst the cornerstones of ONCORELIEF is the employment of novel big data and AI techniques to analyse patterns and generate insights that will help to better understand and consequently transform services and knowledge that needs to be conveyed to users, which has to do with their post-treatment QoL and way of living. This pillar consists of the following objectives: 

• Objective 2.1: To identify, collect and transform various heterogenous data streams into a well specified, extendable, linkable and standard-compliant data model able to describe critical factors relevant to post treatment environments and activities.
• Objective 2.2: To employ novel GDPR perspective security and privacy mechanism for enabling the secure exchange of data and the generation of trust to the ONCORELIEF platform, safeguarding private sensitive data of users 
• Objective 2.3: To design a set of smart algorithms that can be used at generic levels for generating reports that provide group analytics for monitoring similar individuals and that verify or possibly lead to new clinical protocols.
• Objective 2.4: To individualize data algorithms though AI outputs for offering personalized insights and recommendations to individuals based on their specific medical history, needs, life patterns, environment and activities.
• Objective 2.5: To incorporate AI elements for the development of self-learning and incorporation of empathic features to the assistant providing it with the necessary intelligence and the empathic personalized behavioural features related with the patient characteristics, cancer type, treatment, clinical settings, etc.

Development of innovative technological elements for providing personalized wellbeing

Building upon the active user-involvement, ONCORELIEF will proceed with the development of its technological concepts, including the implementation of a novel smartphone application (ONCORELIEF Guardian Angel) and wellbeing QoL index (ONCORELIEF index) used as the basic tool for supporting the patients, and the development of a platform incorporating AI elements and advanced data processing for accurate wellbeing assessment, while integrating with low-cost, off-the-shelf sensing devices for measuring parameters of the everyday environment (i.e. personal, social, working, etc.). This pillar consists of the following objectives:

• Objective 3.1: To create a digital smart guardian angel running on a smartphone, providing personalized information on cancer-patients wellbeing and supporting them in everyday routine tasks that improve their aftertreatment quality of life and decrease their psychological stress.
• Objective 3.2: To setup a sensing infrastructure incorporating off-the-shelf sensing devices, measuring environment parameters affecting the wellbeing of the cancer-patient. In order to assess the wellbeing and status of the user, a combination of wearable sensing devices, which provide very accurate readings about the user activities and bio-signals such as heart rate or oxygen blood level, and other ambient non-wearable monitoring devices, that can greatly improve the contextual information of the user, will be used.
• Objective 3.3: To define an Index reflecting the wellbeing level of a cancer-patient taking into account (a) the clinical setting of diagnosis, treatment and after-treatment follow-up of the patient, (b) measurable parameters and inputs provided by the patient, and (c) dynamically adjusting to the treatment and after-cure changes by reflecting the overall wellbeing level of the users.
• Objective 3.4: To develop reporting tools giving useful insights and notifications to the patient regarding his wellbeing, health status, psychological wellbeing and post-treatment related needs, and on the progress regarding its condition and its measurable parameters.

Piloting in different cancer types and patient-environment settings

ONCORELIEF will be exhaustively validated and evaluated in real-life settings, for different types of cancer, taking into account cross-gender needs and diverse patient environments. Two 12-month pilot studies (Germany and Italy) are planned, with the participation of 450 patients. Additionally, pre-pilot activities will take place, focusing on ONCORELIEF technical verifications and for collecting early user feedback and incorporating it into the ONCORELIEF prototypes.

• Objective 4.1: To validate early prototypes of the proposed system and services for trial operation in semicontrolled environments aiming to use data collected to improve the technical aspects (robustness, interfaces, resources usage, etc.) of the system for the trials execution with end users.
• Objective 4.2: To validate the proposed solution for 12 months with active cancer patients following posttreatment suffering from different types of cancer, namely Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) and Colorectal Cancer (CRC), in various pilot sites. This will allow the consortium to examine the projects’ impact.
• Objective 4.3: Perform controlled pre-pilot activities on the specifications and projects’ early prototypes with clearly envisioned outcomes at Year 1 and Year 2 of the project that will be put under the evaluation and scrutiny of the end-users. This will help to focus on the real value delivered to end users by incorporating their feedback at critical progress milestones as well as train our data-models, thereby improving their accuracy and performance.

Active engagement of stakeholders resulting to measurable impacts

ONCORELIEF will involve the stakeholders during the whole project duration to achieve high-user acceptance, by adopting a user-centred design methodology (through the use of design thinking methods and tools) and thoroughly designing our pilots. This principle will be combined with rich dissemination activities and detailed feasibility and competition analysis for the development of an accurate go-to-market strategy. Towards this direction the following objectives will be fulfilled:

• Objective 5.1: Engage the stakeholders by adopting a design thinking methodology including six stages of involvement: define, research, ideate, prototype, deliver and learn, helping to understand better the user needs and pains, encourage inputs from a wide variety of stakeholders (patients, doctors, healthcare professionals, etc.), and design solutions that best reflect the preferences and user requirements.
• Objective 5.2: Involve stakeholders from multiple disciplines Following the previous one, this objective regards the engagement and participation in the pilots and evaluation process of a sufficient number of different types of stakeholders (e.g. patients, doctors, healthcare professionals, and psychologists etc.).
• Objective 5.3 Achieve wider user-driven steering of the project by establishing synergies with European and international associations and currently running EU R&I projects that will in turn promote and facilitate the smooth and early adoption of the proposed offerings.
• Objective 5.4: Define appropriate business and go-to market strategy in order to enable the wide, smooth and fast adoption of its outcomes by relevant stakeholders.