Mobile application for monitoring oncological treatments of children of the Carlos Portela Foundation

Cancer is considered a major public health problem in Colombia. This disease is considered highly complex and expensive, given the safety and control measures that patients, family members and medical staff involved in the treatment must practice. This pathology also affects children and young people, in such a way that leukemia is the main cause of death in children. Family members and companions play an important role in the recovery process of the infant, but due to educational and socioeconomic factors, the follow-up of oncological treatment is insufficient, for this reason, the treatments are abandoned. Taking into account the above, this work presents a mobile application called Promesa de vida to track oncological treatments of children with leukemia who are in an age range between 2 and 17 years. This with the purpose that children, caregivers and family members have a technological tool that allows to take an effective control and treatment of the disease. The mobile application allows users to coordinate their activities and obligations during medical procedures, provide self-care strategies and information about appointments, treatments, preventive measures that help maximize the survival time of children and prevent abandonment of medical treatments. The mobile application was developed following a User Centered Design approach, specifically the Usability and Accessibility Engineering Process Model (MPIu+a). This research was carried out at the Carlos Portela foundation in Cali, Colombia, a place of refuge for families from different regions of the country who face the problem of childhood cancer. The foundation aims to provide support to more than 500 low-income children suffering from cancer, as well as helping their families, this in order to improve their quality of life and their expectations of cure. The first phase of the model (MPIu+a) is the requirements analysis. The techniques used for the collection of information were: field observation and interviews. These techniques allowed to interact with the stakeholders and identify their needs. Once the information collected was analyzed, the following needs were detected: (i) families need to follow the oncological treatment of the children while they are away from the hospital center, (ii) reminders of oncological treatment activities are required, (iii) it is necessary to know general information about leukemia, and (iv) direct telephone communication with hospital centers is required. After identifying the needs of the users, the prototype process of the mobile application began. Hi-fidelity prototypes were developed because they provide an interactive simulation of system functions. For this process the prototyping tools Justinmind prototyper and Marvel were used. The prototypes were evaluated using the driver's method, in order to analyze the user's interaction with the design proposal. From this first evaluation it was possible to adjust aspects of navigation, information architecture, size of some interface controls, as well as identify symbols that were not familiar to users. When the evaluation of the high-fidelity prototype finished, the software prototype development process began. For this, the Java programming language and the Android Studio development environment were used. The mobile application uses the architectural pattern: Model View Controller (MVC). The software prototype was evaluated through unit tests (black box tests) and the Formal Experiments evaluation method was applied in 2 moments in order to analyze the user's interaction with the system. This method allowed to obtain quantitative and qualitative information by the user and their interaction with the application, which helps to detect usability problems and to know the degree of user acceptance. The proposed mobile application considers basic usability guidelines, is multisensory, minimalist and tries to adapt to the social, educational and cultural conditions of the users. The application contributes to the monitoring of cancer treatments and allows communication between families and medical care centers. In addition, it is a tool for social awareness because it provides guidelines and information for the care of patients. This project tries to make a social contribution because we want to benefit a vulnerable and low-income population of the Colombian south-west. Taking into account that the users completed all the tasks proposed during the evaluations and the results of the tests are positive, we could say that the use of the mobile application meets the needs of the user initially identified. The Usability and Accessibility Engineering Process Model (MPIu+a) used as a methodological guide for the development of this mobile application was completely useful, because it allowed actively linking the user in each phase of the project development. This ensured conducting periodic usability evaluations with real users and at the same time collecting recommendations from users regarding the design and interactivity of the application. As future work, on the one hand it is convenient to refine the design of the application considering emotional design guidelines, as well as to include new personalization options, for example: personalization of the sound of alarms. On the other hand, it would be appropriate to include new fields in the medication insertion form that allow entering the available units of the medicine, as well as its expiration date. This in order to achieve greater control of the state and available quantity of the medication consumed. It would be really interesting to ensure that the application was used to a greater extent by medical institutions to monitor the patient, as well as that medical staff enter information complementary to the application for greater control and clinical monitoring of the patient. In this sense, it would be useful for users to send information to medical staff in real time through the mobile application, such as: images, videos of any symptoms, status, patient reaction, etc., to optimize assistance while the user arrives at the hospital.