Calm for Cancer Patients Receiving Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is a common strategy used to treat colorectal cancer patients, but is often leads patients and survivors to experience a host of symptoms, of which acute emotional distress is a major concern. Smartphone-based meditation via an already-developed app (i.e., Calm) is a unique and novel way of providing a potentially helpful symptom-management strategy to colorectal cancer patients and survivors both during their chemotherapy treatment sessions for the management of distress and between treatment sessions for the management of other more chronic symptoms. Our hypothesis is that colorectal cancer patients using the Calm smartphone app throughout their chemotherapy treatment will see lower psychological distress during individual chemotherapy treatment sessions, greater chemotherapy tolerability, lower chemotherapy toxicity symptoms, lesser fatigue, and higher quality of life as compared to a usual care control group. Colorectal cancer patients (N=30) will be randomly assigned to an intervention (n=15) or control group (n=15) for the duration of their chemotherapy treatment, with study outcome measurement occurring throughout their treatment.