Today's session will highlight two diverse programs that use software as a median for community research and education. With the ubiquity of smart phones most of us use mobile applications or apps designed to run on smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices on a daily basis. Some may be familiar with second life,a free virtual world where users can socialize,connect and create and share services using voice and text chat. Today's cyber seminar will highlight how these platforms have been used to engage audiences around key cancer control initiatives of the Texan A&M school of world public health,and the Texas Life Science Foundation will join us to share an over view of the AYA healthy survivorship app. Designed for adolescents and young adult cancer survivors, this application allows users to assess their health habits using theory-based interactive tool, and gives survivors individual scores for lifestyle,nutrition and well-being among other indicators. Dr. Versie Johnson-Mallardof the University of South Florida will demonstrate the virtual environment second life and how it was used as educational intervention to increase the knowledge of HPV. Dr. Johnson-Mallard will discuss the ethicacy of second life as an educational intervention in improving knowledge of HPV,a virus linked to causing cervical cancer.
The final part of the Webinar will be dedicated to Q&A and discussion,and will offer you the opportunity to engage with the presenters and share your own experiences,thoughts and lessons learned. Full bios for each of today's speakers are also available on the research to reality dot cancer dot gov,where you will also be able to engage in discussion form on today's topic,as well as view the archive of our previous cyber seminars. As always, the final part of this call will be devoted to your questions and comments. At any time during the presentation please press star one to be placed in the queue to ask your question live during question and answer portion of this seminar,or if you prefer,you can also submit your questions using the Q&A feature at the top of your screen,just type in your question and hit ask. We thank you all for joining us today,and look forward to this important and informative topic. With that I'll turn it over to Miss to start us off.
What I'd like to do is kind of walk through today's discussion. First of all I'll provide background on AYA,or adolescent young adult cancer survivors, and why we selected this population for our application development. I'll give a brief overview of the emerging field of (M-health) and the application of health behavior theories;and also discuss some opportunities for what we believe are the need for some new the heretical or framework development. I'll review the development of the app itself including the budget, the technology and our collaborators,and how we worked interactively with them. Then we'll give a brief tour of the app itself,and finally some of our lessons learned and the next steps.
So why an app for AYAs, adolescent young adults,which I continue to refer to as AYAs, are cancer survivors in the ages ranging from 15to 39 years of age,which is a pretty broad group. They've been a focus of national investigation in the U. S. and actually internationally for the past eight years,since the National Cancer Institute and Live Strong Foundations first joint progress review group on young adolescent young adult oncology was convened.
FYI, this group was reconvened on a member of it,and there will be a new report coming out soon. In the U. S. we diagnose about 75,000 AYAs a year. We think there about 20 million of them globally. Overall, unlike older and pediatric cancer survivors,there has been little improvement in survivorship among AYAs in the past two decades. The cause of this lack of survival continues to be explored with consideration of both biological and social factors that affect survivorship. Clearly, quality of life among AYA survivors is an area of concern,especially duet o the lasting effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment,and the effects especially on younger bodies. If you consider that older cancer survivors that are diagnosed generally around the ages of 60 to 65,may only have 20 years of survivor. That's important survivor ship too. It's concerning. For the AYAs diagnosed in their teens or twenties may have 40or 50 more years of survivorship.
There is a longer period of time for late effects to emerge and require attention. Clearly, we believe there is some health behavior changes that can improve the quality of life among AYAs. That was one of our rationales for selecting that population,or this population for the app development. The other is clearly mentioned how ubiquitous smartphones are for all of us. In the U. S. smart phone adoption, and also globally is among the highest in this age group according to the Internet and American lifer e-search study.
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