Motivation and Quantification of Physical Activity for Hospitalised Cancer Patients

Abstract: Previous studies have shown the positive effect of increased physical activity for cancer patients during treatments of chemotherapy and stem cell transplantation. Moderate exercise has shown to cause significantly less loss of muscle mass, less symptoms of cancer related fatigue, less need for platelet transfusions during treatment time and shorter hospitalisation. Inactivity at hospital clinics is though still a major concern and it seems like lack of motivation plays a big roll. It has been shown that an overview of activity level, personal goal setting and education on the importance of physical activity can work as a motivation towards increased physical activity. This project aimed to make a prototype that can quantify physical activity of hospitalised cancer patients and represent it in a motivational and informative way. An accelerometer was used to collect activity data; the data was processed and used to train a support vector machine for classification of activities. Activities recognised by the prototype are the postures lying down, sitting and standing as well as recognising when the user is active. Over 90% accuracy was obtained in activity recognition for specific training sets. The prototype was tested on patients at the haematology clinic at the Karolinska hospital in Huddinge. Test subjects rated the classification accuracy and the motivational value of the prototype on a scale of 1-5. The accuracy was rated 4.2 out of 5 and the motivational value 3.25 out of 5. A pilot study to further test the feasibility of the product will be performed in the summer of 2015.