Monitoring Patients in Ambulatory Palliative Care: a Design for an Observational Study

Abstract

We present the setup of an observational study that aims to examine the application of wearables inambulatory palliative care to monitor the patients’ health status – especially during the transition phase fromhospital to home since this phase is critical and often patients are re-hospitalised. Following an user-centreddesign approach, we performed interviews with patients recruited at the Clinic of Radiation Oncology of theUniversity Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. The patient group was perceived as vulnerable and varied largelyin physiological burden and mental aspects. Special needs concern primarily obtrusiveness of the systemand sensitivity in the work with this patient group. With the deployment of the system, we gathered firstexperiences: the first patient was tracked over 12 weeks resulting in 84 tracked days, 181 digital questionnaireanswers, 40908 collected GPS points, 861 hours of heart rate measurements and positive feedback of thepatient.

Keywords

• palliative care
• user interviews
• remote monitoring systems
• real-world deployment
• wearable sensing