Spotlight On... Cedars-Sinai hospital to deploy FitBit to measure mobility of chemotherapy patients; NEJM weighs in on digital health; FDA requires PMA for insomnia, anxiety neurostim; and more...

Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is seeking to assess the mobility of cancer patients during chemotherapy using the Fitbit Charge HR. Patients who remain active during chemotherapy are more likely to tolerate and benefit from the treatment than those who remain in bed. "Part of the problem is that physicians really want to provide treatment to their patients. And patients themselves--either because they don't remember, or they have a subjective understanding of how they've been doing, or they want treatment--say they're doing better than they were doing at home," said principal investigator Dr. Arvind Shinde of the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute. The researchers hope to more accurately measure mobility among 30 cancer patients who will wear the FitBit for two weeks. "A 30-patient study is not enough to give us all the data we need," Shinde said. "The next step will be to do a larger study across multiple tumor types and follow people longitudinally for a much longer period of time. We can see how they do as they progress through their treatments, follow their ups and downs. We'll be able to get changes over baseline and create a better algorithm for this assessment." More

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