Smartphones in Oncology: The Future of Patient-Generated Data

How Patient-Generated Health Data Is Reshaping Cancer Care

With more than 2.5 billion smartphone users worldwide, oncologists have access to a data source most clinical trials still barely tap: the sensor-rich device already in every patient’s pocket. A peer-reviewed review published in Seminars in Radiation Oncology, co-authored by Koneksa Health’s Matt Cantor alongside radiation oncology researchers from NYU, Thomas Jefferson, Duke, and Montefiore, examines how patient-generated health data (PGHD) captured through smartphones can influence oncologists’ clinical decision-making.

Key Themes from the Review

Continuous, passive monitoring: Smartphones can passively capture behavioral and physiological signals between clinical encounters, enabling real-time remote monitoring rather than relying solely on periodic in-clinic assessments.
Digital biomarkers in oncology: The authors describe emerging applications for digital biomarkers derived from smartphone sensors, extending the reach of PGHD beyond simple activity tracking into clinically actionable measures.
Personalized, proactive care: By enabling information sharing and continuous data capture, smartphone-derived PGHD supports more personalized clinical decision-making and more proactive intervention during and after cancer treatment.
Real-world evidence beyond trial populations: Practice-shaping oncology trials often enroll patients with excellent performance status and few comorbidities; smartphone-based monitoring offers a path to understanding outcomes in the broader, more representative patient population seen in everyday practice.
Implementation barriers: The review is candid about real obstacles: managing and interpreting continuous sensor data, patient engagement over time, integration with existing EHR systems and clinical workflows, and ethical and privacy considerations around PGHD.
A call for collaboration: The authors emphasize that multidisciplinary collaboration, spanning clinicians, technologists, and data scientists, is needed to build mobile sensing frameworks that can scale for remote monitoring of deteriorating health during or after cancer treatment.

The Takeaway for Sponsors and Clinical Research Teams

This review reinforces a theme central to digital biomarker strategy across therapeutic areas: the technology to capture continuous, patient-generated data already exists, the differentiator is building the frameworks to make that data clinically meaningful and operationally usable. For oncology specifically, that means solving for data integration, patient engagement, and workflow fit, not just sensor accuracy.

This is the kind of end-to-end digital measurement thinking Koneksa Health brings to sponsors, from digital biomarker selection through data pipeline design, so continuous patient data can actually reach the clinical decisions it’s meant to inform.

Reference: Purswani JM, Dicker AP, Champ CE, Cantor M, Ohri N. Big Data From Small Devices: The Future of Smartphones in Oncology. Semin Radiat Oncol. 2019;29(4):338-347. doi:10.1016/j.semradonc.2019.05.008. PMID: 31472736.