Digital Health for Geriatric Oncology

Abstract

In this review, we describe state-of-the-art digital health solutions for geriatric oncology and explore the potential application of emerging remote health-monitoring technologies in the context of cancer care. We also discuss the benefits and motivations behind adopting technology for symptom monitoring of older adults with cancer. We provide an overview of common symptoms and of the digital solutions–designed remote symptom assessment. We describe state-of-the-art systems for this purpose and highlight the limitations and challenges for the full-scale adoption of such solutions in geriatric oncology. With rapid advances in Internet-of-things technologies, many remote assessment systems have been developed in recent years. Despite showing potential in several health care domains and reliable functionality, few of these solutions have been designed for or tested in older patients with cancer. As a result, the geriatric oncology community lacks a consensus understanding of a possible correlation between remote digital assessments and health-related outcomes. Although the recent development of digital health solutions has been shown to be reliable and effective in many health-related applications, there exists an unmet need for development of systems and clinical trials specifically designed for remote cancer management of older adults with cancer, including developing advanced remote technologies for cancer-related symptom assessment and psychological behavior monitoring at home and developing outcome-oriented study protocols for accurate evaluation of existing or emerging systems. We conclude that perhaps the clearest path to future large-scale use of remote digital health technologies in cancer research is designing and conducting collaborative studies involving computer scientists, oncologists, and patient advocates.