Course introduction

Hi everyone!! Welcome to this new course on smart health technologies for cancer management. Myself, PhD. Shabbir Syred Abdul, assistant professor at Graduate Institute of Biomedical Informatics, Taipei Medical University, Taiwan I am glad to bring this course. This is my third course in future Learn.

And most of you may be familiar with my previous courses: on IOT for elderly care, and social media for health research. In this course, I’ve invited educators from different countries, including Taipei Medical University and Qatar Institute and Ireland. The main purpose of this video is to let you know why you need this course and what you guys are going to learn from this course. First, why you need this course? we will be targeting on cancer, patients with cancers. Because for the reason, nowadays cancers are becoming chronic diseases. What does it mean? It means, with advancement in medical sciences, we are able to … We are able to diagnose. We are able to treat.

We are able to keep them on long term… survive. However, What is lacking now is we are unable to give them their life how it was before they were diagnosed with the cancer. So, what happens with any person, all of a sudden, he or she knows that she got cancer. She got depressed. She will be isolated from social network of their friends, and relatives. Stuff like that. So, what is really we need is how we can improve the quality of life of such patients or such people So, in this course, we are trying to assist them. We are going to not only assisting to the patients, But also assisting for the care providers and care takers of such patients.

How they can make them more involved with social network with their friends and relatives. And how they can use technologies to rehabilitate. Meaning, to gain the functions of their… like body functions of their physical activities back as they were before surgery or before treatment. And also, we want to focus how we can follow up the patients with cancers for long term with their care providers. So overall, in short, what we want to teach is how we can use technologies in order to assist patients with cancers to improve the quality of life. Then, what you will learn? Definitely, you will be learning about advanced digital health technologies available.

How you can use for example, Google home, and how you can use Alexa or… Siri, to get assistance for your daily day-to-day life. Also, we will focus on some wearable devices and how you can use make use of those things, and how you can get more social with your friends and family members. And also, how gamification will be helping you, in order to improve your… well mental well-being and also physical well-being or physical activity. Digital assistance for patients and also monitoring and quantifying health habits that affects for the patients with cancers and how you can improve the quality of life? That is the most important thing on overall course. how we can improve the quality of life.

You will be learning about brain and body connections, and strategies for increasing mental well-being in patients with cancer. Also, we will see how your physical activity will affect your mental well-being. Gamification for health promotion in patients with cancer. There we talk about various APPs available on mobiles. And see which sort of gamification will be more useful for you and how you can make use of such APPs. Rehabilitation exercise for cancer care, or empowerment of patient with cancer through social media. Also, we had an interview of a patient, a cancer survivor. And you will be knowing how his life has changed once … he got diagnosed as a, with cancer. and how he was hoping with his life.

And how he trying to come back to the normal life which he had before he was… …was a diagnosed with the cancer. And at last, I would like to use some hints. During your learning of the course in FutureLearn platform, please complete all activities recommended in the course. That means, you need to see all videos. And you need to read the materials we have recommended. So that you get more knowledge about it. And the most important is communication between learners. From our previous experience, we had audience from about 85 countries to 100 different countries participating in same course. That means people from various countries, various background and various stage of their life.

Meaning, some were patients, some were healthcare providers, some were researchers, some were… health policy makers. So all we had such different group of audience and they were sharing their experience that really makes the course more important than normal day-to-day… face to face course. And also I really request you guys to give your feedback on each video and shares what we have done good and what we need to improve. And at last, I want you to click on “mark as complete.” at the bottom of your webpage, where you take the course. so that the system will know you guys have really completed the task which we have provided. Otherwise, we feel like you are not seeing the video.

Or you are not seeing the…reading materials which we have suggested. And also, we want you to take the quiz which is very important in order to evaluate your knowledge. And that will make all your course complete. Unless until you take the evaluation quiz, you will be not given the, like, final mark, of saying you have satisfactory finished the course. So please do it. And thank you for watching this video. Let’s get started!!