RELEVIUM empowers patients and assists them in living a less strenuous life while they are forced to endure the difficulties of pancreatic cancer.
The main hypothesis of RELEVIUM is that quality of life (QoL) of advanced pancreatic cancer patients can be significantly improved by reducing pain and cachexia through highly personalised nutrition, physical activity, and pain management strategies, in addition to chemotherapy treatment. To achieve this, RELEVIUM empowers patients with digital tools that facilitate patient-doctor communication and enable them to self-manage their disease. For many European PDAC patients, multiple barriers to effective supportive and palliative care reduce their QoL and overall survival (OS). This includes (i) increased treatment costs, (ii) the burden of frequent hospital visits, (iii) lack of access to large cancer-centre care facilities, and (iv) the lack of sufficient information for general practitioners and clinicians to effectively adapt supportive and palliative care parameters to the individual needs of these PDAC patients. RELEVIUM aims to address these issues by proposing a multimodal supportive intervention based on continuous remote monitoring technologies for (i) pain estimation, (ii) estimation of muscle mass/sarcopenia, (iii) monitoring of nutrition, as well as (iv) physical activity of advanced PDAC patients. The project will first conduct a feasibility and data collection study (RELEVIUM-FDC), and then a randomized clinical trial (RELEVIUM-RCT) involving 5 clinical cancer centres in Germany, France, Belgium, Estonia and Israel. These studies will assess the effectiveness of the proposed interventions in improving the quality of life of advanced PDAC patients. Furthermore, several important parameters will be explored, such as (i) the cost-effectiveness of the proposed solution, (ii) its potential in increasing health equity across the populations of the participating countries, in terms of access to supportive and palliative care for advanced PDAC patients and (iii) the stress burden of the disease on the families and family caregivers of the patients. With these strategies and the proposed AI-based solutions, RELEVIUM aims to empower PDAC patients to self-manage their disease, reflect and optimize their individual QoL, and receive improved clinician guidance, independently of their home and country.