ABSTRACT
Abdominal cancer is one of the most frequent and dangerous cancers in the world, particularly among the elderly. Major surgery is associated with a significant deterioration in quality of life. Cancer patients assigned for abdominal surgery are often given exercise programmes prior to surgery (prehabilitation) aimed at improving fitness to reduce pre-operative risk. Prehabilitation plays a significant role in postoperative recovery of muscle strength, boosting quality of life and improving physical functionality in all stages of care. However, only a small proportion of patients follow a supervised hospital-based prehabilitation setting, whereas a number of these patients live in remote locations, and it is often difficult for health professionals to accurately monitor and provide feedback on exercise and activity levels. The Internet of Things (IoT) and advancements in digital health that are revolutionising all industries and markets could be used to advance and convert conventional prehabilitation care into smart prehabilitation care.
This paper proposes an IoT environment for end-to-end monitoring of cancer patient prehabilitation-related activity movements. Functionality of the attributes involved in the environment has been discussed pragmatically through experimental analysis. Results reflect that the environment can offer flexibility for different movement monitoring, analysis, and visualisation applications. In addition, the paper describes the overall system architecture, considering a distributed computation model that includes wearable sensors, access points and edge or cloud-related computing.
