MoovCare App Has Been Proven to Help Lung Cancer Patients Live Longer

Modern technology has shown to have a surprising, yet exciting effect on providing help for cancer patients.

A recent study found that a web application called MoovCare was highly effective in prolonging the lives of people with advanced lung cancer. The groundbreaking results are making waves in both the cancer-research and web-technology fields — with experts in both areas increasingly working together to offer help for cancer patients.

What is MoovCare?

MoovCare empowers patients to take control of their own health through self-reporting on their conditions through the medical software device.

The app, created by Sivan Innovation, centers on the idea that cancer patients can prevent relapses, and elongate their life expectancy, by keeping track of a fixed set of symptoms each week. Users, or those who care for them, access the system once a week and register how they’re feeling based on 12 clinical symptoms.

While most cancer patients attend frequent in-person follow-ups with their physicians, MoovCare relies on a specific algorithm that raises a red flag as soon as a change in symptoms could suggest a relapse — cutting out the wait time some patients may experience in waiting to see if their condition improves.

If such an event occurs, the MoovCare team reaches out to the patient’s physician for intervention.

The app is accessible on the web, as well as through a smartphone.

What Does the Research Say?

The French Institut de Cancérologie de l’Ouest conducted a study using MoovCare of 133 patients with lung cancer who were at high risk for a relapse after surgery. Most had stage III or stage IV cancer.

Researchers asked one group of patients to self-report their symptoms using MoovCare and the other to rely on standard in-person physician follow-ups. Study organizers found that the MoovCare patients more effectively caught symptoms associated with a relapse and yet reported half the number of imaging scans compared with the group that received standard care; those group members typically met with their doctors and received CT scans every 3-6 months.

At the end of the study, about 75 percent of the MoovCare group members were still alive, while just half of the standard group members were. The MoovCare group members also had an average life expectancy of 19 months, while expectancy was just 12 months for the other group.

Though more research can shed light on MoovCare’s life-saving power, help for cancer patients appears to have entered a new realm with this pioneering app.