SenseCheQ: Home-based Nerve Function Self-Assessment using Autonomous Quantitative Sensory Testing

Neuropathy caused by chemotherapy is a common and debilitating side-effect of cancer treatment. With 30% of patients experiencing chronic neuropathy and with no good evidence-based treatments; early detection triggering chemotherapy regime modification remains the best option for prevention. Early detection is challenging because of a lack of diagnostic tools with sufficient longitudinal temporal precision and convenience for patient/clinical adoption. To tackle this problem, we developed SenseCheQ; enabling self-administered autonomous sensory testing which can be used by patients at home. We present the instrumental engineering approach taken to address the challenge, including haptic self-calibration combined with skin thermal-clamping protocols, and demonstrate robustly reliable performance in the face of environmental and user-related variance in home settings. We present prospective case studies of people having chemotherapy treatment for cancer, conducting regular unsupervised quantitative sensory testing to monitor their nerve function at home. These proof-of-principle studies show SenseCheQ can detect sub-clinical changes in nerve function, matching patient reported outcomes and lab-based sensory testing. This highlights SenseCheQs promise as a scalable biomarker platform for neuropathy-detection and therapeutic development.