Digital Biomarkers of Symptom Burden Self-Reported by Perioperative Patients Undergoing Pancreatic Surgery: Prospective Longitudinal Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cancer treatments can cause a variety of symptoms that impair quality of life and functioning but are frequently missed by clinicians. Smartphone and wearable sensors may capture behavioral and physiological changes indicative of symptom burden, enabling passive and remote real-time monitoring of fluctuating symptoms. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine whether smartphone and Fitbit data could be used to estimate daily symptom burden before and after pancreatic surgery. METHODS: A total of 44 patients scheduled for pancreatic surgery participated in this prospective longitudinal study and provided sufficient sensor and self-reported symptom data for analyses. Participants collected smartphone sensor and Fitbit data and completed daily symptom ratings starting at least two weeks before surgery, throughout their inpatient recovery, and for up to 60 days after postoperative discharge. Day-level behavioral features reflecting mobility and activity patterns, sleep, screen time, heart rate, and communication were extracted from raw smartphone and Fitbit data and used to classify the next day as high or low symptom burden, adjusted for each individual's typical level of reported symptoms. In addition to the overall symptom burden, we examined pain, fatigue, and diarrhea specifically. RESULTS: Models using light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) were able to correctly predict whether the next day would be a high symptom day with 73.5% accuracy, surpassing baseline models. The most important sensor features for discriminating high symptom days were related to physical activity bouts, sleep, heart rate, and location. LightGBM models predicting next-day diarrhea (79.0% accuracy), fatigue (75.8% accuracy), and pain (79.6% accuracy) performed similarly. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that digital biomarkers may be useful in predicting patient-reported symptom burden before and after cancer surgery. Although model performance in this small sample may not be adequate for clinical implementation, findings support the feasibility of collecting mobile sensor data from older patients who are acutely ill as well as the potential clinical value of mobile sensing for passive monitoring of patients with cancer and suggest that data from devices that many patients already own and use may be useful in detecting worsening perioperative symptoms and triggering just-in-time symptom management interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".