Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Mar 10, 2021
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 9, 2021 - Mar 16, 2021
Date Accepted: Apr 12, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Breast cancer smartphone Application: a cyber-buddy to navigate across the breast cancer journey. A pilot and feasibility test.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Several mobile phone applications (Apps) have been designed for patients with a diagnosis of cancer. Unfortunately, despite the promising potentials and impressive spread, their effectiveness remains often unclear. Mobile applications are in fact, most of the times, developed lacking any quality assessment procedure (evidence-based) and medical professional involvement. Furthermore, they are often implemented in clinical care before any research is done to confirm usability, appreciation, and clinical benefits for patients.
Objective:
From this standpoint we have developed a new smartphone application specifically designed by breast care specialists and patients together with the aim to help breast cancer patients to better understand and organize their journey through the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The aim of the present paper is to describe the development of the App and the related protocol designed to assess its validity, which was then administered to 20 patients in a feasibility test run.
Methods:
A mixed method study with a quantitative data collection and administration of semi-structured interviews was designed. Twenty patients participated in the project (M = 51 years, SD = 10 years). The usability of the App, the user experience, and the empowerment were measured after 1 month. The semi-structured interviews measured the utility of the App and the necessary improvements.
Results:
Correlations and regressions analyses showed that the App received good evaluations by the patients and increased their sense of control over the cancer journey. The interviews suggested the need to constantly keep the App updated and synchronize it with the hospital electronic agenda, while carefully select the best timing for offering the tool to final users is crucial.
Conclusions:
Despite the very small numbers of the test run, findings demonstrate the potentials of the App and its validation protocol, supporting a fully powered trial to evaluate the empowering effect of the mHealth App. More data will be gathered in a second phase with an improved version of the App on a larger study population.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.