Clinical trial · Interventional
Efficacy of a Self-advocacy Serious Game Intervention
Efficacy of a Self-advocacy Serious Game Intervention for Women With Advanced Cancer
- Source
- ClinicalTrials.gov
- Retrieved
- Sep 8, 2026
- Layer
- normalized (units and labels harmonized; values unchanged)
- Run
- ING-CLINICALTRIALS-20260908-000001
Summary
Brief summary (as posted)
Individuals with cancer must overcome multiple, ongoing challenges ("self-advocate") related to their cancer experience to receive patient-centered care. Women with metastatic cancer often face significant challenges managing their quality of life concerns and cancer- and treatment-related symptoms. If they do not self-advocate to manage these concerns, they risk having poor quality of life, high symptom burden, and care that is not patient-centered. Serious games (video games that teach) are effective health interventions that allow users to vicariously engage in situations reflecting their personal experiences, receive meaningful information, and learn personally relevant skills that they can apply in real life. The goal of the current study is to test the efficacy of a novel intervention using a serious game platform to teach self-advocacy skills to women with advanced cancer. The Strong Together intervention consists of a multi-session, interactive serious game application with tailored self-advocacy goal-setting and training. The serious game is based on a self-advocacy conceptual framework and applies behavior change theories and serious game mechanisms to promote skill development and implementation. The game works by immersing users in the experiences of characters who are women with advanced cancer; requiring users to make decisions about how the characters self-advocate; demonstrating the positive and negative consequences of self-advocating or not, respectively; and providing multiple, individualized feedback mechanisms and game features to enforce self-advocacy skill acquisition and transference to real life.
Conditions
Conditions (2)
Free-text conditions as registered, with the CancerIndex entity they were reconciled to and the match type.
| Condition (as posted) | Mapped entity | Match | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quality of Life | — | UNRESOLVED | — |
| Self-Management | — | UNRESOLVED | — |
Interventions
Interventions (2)
| Intervention | Type | Mapped drug | Match |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enhanced Care as Usual | Behavioral | — | UNRESOLVED |
| Strong Together serious game | Behavioral | — | UNRESOLVED |
Design
Arms and outcomes
Arms (2)
- type
- EXPERIMENTAL
- label
- Serious game intervention
- description
- Participants receive the Strong Together serious game program on a tablet computer.
- interventionNames
- Behavioral: Strong Together serious game
- type
- ACTIVE_COMPARATOR
- label
- Enhanced care as usual
- description
- Participants receive a paper-based self-advocacy guide.
- interventionNames
- Behavioral: Enhanced Care as Usual
Primary outcomes (2)
- measure
- Mean change from baseline in self-advocacy scores on the Female Self-Advocacy in Cancer Survivorship (FSACS) Scale at 3 months
- timeFrame
Eligibility
Eligibility (as posted)
- Sex
- Female
- Minimum age
- 18 Years
Show eligibility criteria text
Inclusion Criteria: * Female * ≥18 years * Diagnosed with advanced solid organ cancer within the past 6 months being treated with non-curative intent * Have at least a 6-month life expectancy (as determined by their oncologist) * Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance score of 0 to 2 (per health record or oncologist) * Able to read and write in English Exclusion Criteria: * On hospice at the time of recruitment * Impaired cognition (per health record) * Other active, unstable mental health disorder
References
Publications (1)
- DERIVEDThomas TH, Bender C, Rosenzweig M, Taylor S, Sereika SM, Babichenko D, You KL, Terry MA, Sabik LM, Schenker Y. Testing the effects of the Strong Together self-advocacy serious game among women with advanced cancer: Protocol for the STRONG randomized clinical trial. Contemp Clin Trials. 2023 Jan;124:107003. doi: 10.1016/j.cct.2022.107003. Epub 2022 Nov 13. PMID 36379436