Smartphone Pain App for Assessing Oral Mucositis Pain in Patients Receiving Head and Neck Radiation Therapy

OVERVIEW: This is a single-arm, observational, supportive care clinical trial for patients with tumors involving the oral cavity, oropharynx, or unknown primary expecting to receive at least a 50 Gy dose of definitive radiation therapy.

OM PAIN APP (DESCRIPTION): The Oral Mucositis (OM) PAIN APP (App) is a smartphone application that was designed to permit patients to key in pain severity, using a visual analog 0-10 scale. The App is programed with an alarm to prompt the patient to record pain severity at prescribed intervals daily and through spontaneous patient input. Data collected on each patient's smartphone can be backed up wirelessly to a central server where the data can be analyzed remotely or data can be viewed on the device. The software is capable of generating a time-weighted measure of pain, total area under the pain cure (AUC), a summary measure that integrates serial assessments of a patient's pain over the duration of the study.

DAILY OBSERVATION: Subjects will receive a preprogrammed alarm four times a day from their smartphones prompting them to directly enter OM pain levels on the device. Patients may submit as many pain entries as they wish beyond the four minimum levels. Data recording will not commence until radiation starts. Because symptoms of mucositis do not commence typically until the third week of radiation therapy, and no sooner than week 2, recordings from week 1 will be used for baseline data. Recording of data will cease four weeks after the end of radiation therapy at which time mucositis symptoms typically start to resolve and pain symptoms substantially abate.

ACCELEROMETER: Each patient will be issued an accelerometer and will be encouraged to wear it continuously during the study period. To help determine whether decline in physical activity is associated with severity of pain, physical activity will be assessed directly with accelerometers (activity monitor). Participants will wear an accelerometer during sleep and waking hours, but not while bathing, starting one week prior to the start radiation therapy. Accelerometer output data will be obtained in 1-minute epochs that will be then summed to provide raw daily average activity units, which will be subsequently divided by 1000 for clarity. Data will by synced weekly by the study coordinator to a computer connected to a central server.