A mobile application design of cancer follow-up care for breast cancer survivors

Abstract

In this thesis a mobile application is designed, to help breast cancer survivors with cancer follow-up care. One of important challenges of the breast cancer survivors is to track follow-up appointments; such appointments aim to provide medical and psychological support after the breast cancer treatment. There are few advance digital solutions to document and track follow-up care of breast cancer survivors, but it is worth noting that, such systems are designed for professionals and care providers. To the best of our knowledge, there is no digital solution that can be used by patients at this time. Facilitating the follow-up care and motivating the breast cancer patients to continue their treatment is the main aim of this work. The mobile application designed in this thesis generates a default follow-up care plan based on the latest literature, allows users to set Manuel follow-up appointments, allows to document and share complaints, and helps to track her lifestyle habits and interventions. Presenting push notifications about upcoming appointment helps user to continue the follow-up and make progress as planned. On the other hand, information gathered from users in long term will be reliable data to forecast best possible follow-up care plan of new breast cancer survivors in the future. As this application is designed for non-professionals who usually have very limited knowledge of medical terms, it is tried to use simple questions instead of medical terms. Furthermore, by employing simple design elements like, checkbox and drop-down menus, a simple and easy to use application is provided. In order to evaluate the usability of the application and elicit suggestions and improvement ideas, two semi-structured and independent interviews with medical oncologists were conducted. Interview conducted in two parts: first, a brief explanation about the application, its users and possible benefits for the breast cancer survivors was provided, then interviewees were asked to focus on the information gathered from users and provide their improvement ideas. Each interview lasted approximately 30 minutes.