Advances in cancer diagnosis and treatment have been groundbreaking, and we are now considering some cancers as chronic disease rather than fatal illness. This moves the focus in the fight against cancer from sustaining life towards maximizing functional capacity and quality of life. In the past 10-15 years, we have seen the emergence of significant evidence for the clinical effectiveness of active rehabilitation in cancer care, both in maximizing functional capacity and quality of life and preventing secondary recurrence. Furthermore, overall physical activity and health behavioural change is becoming increasingly important in cancer management. However, many barriers to the implementation of active rehabilitation in cancer care exist due to its profound physical and psychological implications. Implementation of solutions that can help patients and clinicians overcome these challenges offers significant benefits to society in that it can enable patients to move beyond cancer and re-establish their role in society, with resultant improvements in quality of life and reduced ongoing health and social care costs.
Technology advances such as AI enabled behaviour change interventions, gamification based on biofeedback, and neuromuscular electrical stimulation can help address some of these barriers, but more must be done before we can effectively marry the technological capability to the unmet clinical need. We need to understand specific challenges and patient journeys associated with cancer care and how we can help patients better leverage psychological tools to engage more effectively in their own care. We then need to optimize technological tools to meet patients’ rehabilitation needs, and finally, to understand how to bring resultant solutions to market where they can have maximum impact on quality of care. This can only be done by an interdisciplinary programme of research involving close collaboration between researchers in academic, clinical, and industry settings.
To meet these needs, CATCH proposed a programme of 8 interrelated PhD projects that focused on 3 key pillars of investigation, understanding the needs of patients undergoing rehabilitation, development and evaluation of technology enabled rehabilitation models, and understanding how these technology enabled models of care could be brought to the real world in a sustainable way.
CATCH was framed around 3 Research Work Packages that were associated with these pillars of investigation; ‘Understanding the Problem’, ‘Technology Interventions’, and ‘Sell and Scale’. The objective was to deliver targeted research outputs related to each PhD project, as well to use the overall programme as a means of developing a model for interdisciplinary research at the intersection between ICT, clinical, and commercial sectors. Our goal was to produce a cohort of PhD graduates who will drive future innovation in technology enabled cancer rehabilitation through interdisciplinary understanding and innovation.
