Development of a mobile health application with dynamic visualization，intelligent reminder and instant messaging for prostate cancer patient management: the RyPros App (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Prostate cancer remains a major cause of mortality in men worldwide, and China's incidence increases significantly. It takes a great deal of effort for clinicians to summarize and analyze data on prostate cancer patients. Only a comprehensive and accurate follow-up of prostate cancer patients can maximize their survival and quality of life. Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in research and use of apps as disease management tools in mobile health. However, very few apps are currently available for prostate cancer patient management, and these apps do not combine the needs of physicians with the needs of patients. OBJECTIVE To develop a mobile health application called RyPros with dynamic visualization，intelligent reminder, and instant messaging for prostatic cancer patient management, which can provide intelligent suggestions for patients' diagnosis and treatment plan, nursing, follow-up measures, and other decisions, realize individualized treatment, and evaluation, improve communication between doctors and patients, inspire patients to develop "focus on me" awareness and proactively cooperate with the treatment. METHODS The application was developed through a four-step procedure: logical structure design, interface design, application programming, and testing. The application's design was based on guidelines and multi-disciplinary collaboration, with dynamic visualization, intelligent reminder, and instant messaging as the core functions, which could be used for data identification and entry, automatic labeling of patients' status. The application also emphasizes protecting the security and privacy of patients' data. RESULTS We implemented and tested the application successfully. After testing, the application generally ran on both the doctor's and the patient's interfaces. The application interfaces were simple, rapid, and smooth; the data storage and reading were stable and accurate. It analyzed the patient's physiology, prostate-specific antigen, serum testosterone, and other monitoring data and dynamically visualized the data and dynamically labeled the disease stage; reminded the patient for follow-up measures and evaluated the patient's health-related quality of life remotely; communicated between different doctors and doctors-patients through instant messaging modules. CONCLUSIONS A mobile health application that addresses dynamic visualization, intelligent reminder, and instant messaging whose main themes can facilitate disease management for prostate cancer patients.