Patients with blood conditions receiving treatment for cancer can be at increased risk of infection, especially when their white blood counts are low.
Detecting infection early is important for making sure that it is treated effectively in these patients. Often this means that patients at high risk of infection are monitored in hospital or need to carry out regular monitoring at home. Ultimately we want to see if patients wearing a 7-day patch that reports movement, heart rate, heart rate variability and breathing rate data in real time could help manage more patients safely at home.
Before we can do this, we would like to use existing data to see if heart rate, breathing rate and other data from routine healthcare records can predict who has a raised temperature, an important marker of infection. Information on heart rate variability is not available in routine healthcare records.
We will study patients under the care of an oncology or haematology team and group them into those with and those without low white cell counts (neutropenia). We will look to see how predictive heart rate and respiratory rate measurements are for a raised temperature. We will also specifically look at whether changes in heart rate and respiratory rate over time can be used to identify which patients have a blood stream infection.
Study findings will be used to support further work trialling wearable devices in hospital inpatients and then, if successful, in patients at home.