The effect of using self-care application on the lifestyle and Quality of life of children with leukemia undergoing chemotherapy

Determining the effect of using a self-care application on the lifestyle and quality of life of children with leukemia undergoing chemotherapy

The clinical trial has a control group, with parallel groups, without blinding, randomized and on 60 patients, the lottery method will be used for randomization.

After designing the software in the Android environment by the software engineering team, first, the lifestyle and quality of life questionnaire of cancer children will be completed and collected by both groups, which are children with leukemia undergoing chemotherapy at Dr. Sheikh Mashhad Hospital. The intervention group will be trained through the application by the researcher and the control group will receive the same educational content in the form of pamphlets and face-to-face training. After completing the questionnaires, 2 months from the end of the intervention, data analysis will be done. It is not possible to blind the research units due to installing the software and blinding the data collectors due to all the procedures being performed by the student.

The population of this research is children with acute leukemia. Inclusion: age range of 7-12 years, suffering from acute leukemia, history of chemotherapy for more than one month, access to a smart mobile phone and the ability to use it. Exclusion: using educational games related to the disease, suffering from a psychological disease

The intervention group will be trained through the application by the researcher, and in the control group, the same educational content will be presented in the form of pamphlets and face-to-face training. The educational content of the application will be related to self-care of children with leukemia with video, text, audio and image content.

Lifestyle, Quality of life

Allocation of samples is done in such a way that patients are entered into two groups of 30 people, intervention or control based on the balanced block method. Considering that completing the research tools and installing the application with relevant explanations will be done when the child is discharged from the ward and in a separate room, so the possibility of information leakage will be very minor or will not exist at all. Random allocation is also done in such a way that at first 6 blocks of 4 will be formed from different placement situations of the two groups and then a lottery will be done once to select the order of the blocks. the advantage of this method is that for every 4 blocks of the research unit, half of the people in the intervention group and half of them will be the control group.