An Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Approach for Remote Assessment of Head and Neck Cancer Patients

Head and neck cancers (HNC) treatments can lead to significant side effects, mainly shoulder dysfunction, and trismus (spasm of jaw muscles). Currently patient's progress, while undergoing treatment, is limited to evaluation during scheduled appointments. Development of strategies to enhance monitoring during follow-up period is needed for earlier identification of problems such as trismus and shoulder dysfunction. In this interdisciplinary research, for the first time, we propose an IoMT enabling application, namely, Automatic Measurement of Trismus and Shoulder Dysfunction (AMTSD), to remotely monitor the recovery. An HNC patient can use AMTSD as a web application frequently (twice/daily) to virtually measure the mouth extension and shoulder range of motion (ROM). The data collected is stored in a database and can be automatically analyzed to assess the progress. Triggers can be set to alert the healthcare team if the patient's condition is regressing. The virtual range of motion measurements are based on the open-source MediaPipe, a cross-platform library from Google. For five volunteers, AMTSD yielded the average measurement error for mouth extension of 1.77% and shoulder ROM of 2.89%.