Art therapy in oncology: are there concrete results?
Several initiatives aim to use data and algorithms to contribute to the community’s well-being. AI for Good, for example, is a movement involving many professionals in the “data” and “AI” fields who bring their expertise to face broad international and humanitarian issues. Often, these projects fall outside the business perspectives that drive our companies. However, contributing to a social cause is far from engaging in such high-caliber projects.
Kode, in his journey, got in touch with LAD (an acronym for the Italian L’Albero dei Desideri), a third-sector organization based in Catania, Italy, that provides psychological support and psychotherapy in pediatric oncology. For us, it was the right opportunity to give a small contribution to a significant cause that required — and will require further more in the future — psychometric data analysis and applied research for the realization of experimental designs.
If we talk about data science solutions for people, this is the project that most of all embodies the essence of digital humanities to us: positioning the human being and its well-being as the centre of any technological application.
What does LAD do?
LAD builds and implements psychological interventions and psychoeducational laboratory activities, driven by the principles of art therapy. From this perspective, art and creativity become a vehicle for improving the quality of life of young patients, supporting their natural growth process. Indeed, the condition of cancer patients risks freezing children’s individualities in the present of illness, while, in that very moment, their development is strongly pushing them toward a future that is just around the corner.
The LAD’s president, Cinzia Favara Scacco, explains that, on the one hand, the imaginal process triggered by creative activities initiates the child toward a reconnection with his/her intimacy, and on the other hand, the creative labs offer opportunities to regain possession of one’s body, going beyond the unemotional and depersonalising rituals imposed by illness.
The need for reliable measures
The query raised by LAD professionals is about how to quantitatively assess the impact of their work. This is a considerable challenge, both because of the complexity of the variables involved, the heterogeneity of the case histories that their service (WonderLAD) takes charge of, and the different types of interventions that are implemented.
We decided to start from the beginning, identifying, among the most credited psychometric tests in the international scientific community, the ones that looked better suited to the LAD context. Then, we submitted them to a validation process. As instruments with clinical purposes, psychometric scales require fine-tuning based on statistical population studies, to verticalize it to specific cultural contexts such as the Italian one.
The Arts Observational Scale was identified as the most appropriate tool. LAD practitioners translated and adapted it to the Italian reality and administered it to groups of children and parents taking part in their activities. Afterward, we analyzed the response patterns by using exploratory procedures, data visualizations, and statistical modeling techniques, focusing on properties such as the degree of consistency among the measures produced and their ability to capture change. Once the robustness of the measures was verified, we moved on to analyze the effectiveness of the interventions.
Results and future perspectives
What is perhaps the most striking result is depicted in the graph below. The heatmap in the figure shows the increase in mood scores of family caregivers (left panel) and patients (right panel) following the interventions.
The two graphs map, on the horizontal axis, the two times of instrument administration (beginning and end of lab sessions). On the vertical axis, the possible mood scores are placed (from 1 to 7). The colors code the density of people belonging to each possible point on the scale. The plots show that, before the interventions, most caregivers and patients were located in the middle of the mood scale (scores 4 or 5). However, after the interventions, the scores have risen sharply, settling on the highest value. An in-depth study conducted at the statistical level revealed the linearity of this increase.
The results of this work were presented last November, 25, during a conference at the WoderLAD center in Catania.
So far, we have built only the first piece of a larger mosaic. Together with LAD, and with the support of professors from the Department of Psychology of the University of Padua, we are working on a larger trial, to evaluate interventions in a broader spectrum of variables such as cognitive and motor skills related ones, to study their connections with the course of disease and the rehabilitation processes.
The most interesting but delicate part comes now, and Kode and LAD are ready to take on this new challenge!
