Development of a motivational tool used for cancer patients to increase their physical activity with focus on front-end

Abstract: Cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy and other treatments tend to become weary, depressed and will inevitably lose a great amount of muscle mass due to said treatments and decreased activity levels. Consequently, extensive research was done on how physical activity can combat the adverse effects of these treatments. Physical activity is not only safe and doable for cancer patients, but it can also increase their quality of life, their physical performance and reduce the duration of hospitalisation. As a result, the Center for Technology in Medicine and Health (CTMH) wanted to tackle this problem by developing a motivational tool that uses a sensor to retrieve measurements about the patient's movement levels. Retrieved data then gets processed on an Android application to provide instant personalised feedback about the progress of the patient in a visual format. This tool illustrates the potential for an application to motivate cancer patients to reach a moderate physical activity level by quantifying their movements. This thesis is focused on a comparison study to compare wearable devices that can measure the patient's activeness, in addition to the design and development of a graphical user interface (GUI) for this tool.