Prevention, intervention, and treatment measures have historically been used to address alcohol use and abuse. New research has explored the use of a smartwatch application to bridge the gap between prevention and intervention, tracking a person’s drinking habits and providing real-time personalized prompts while they are drinking to potentially help them moderate their consumption. These results will be shared at the 47th annual scientific meeting of the Research Society on Alcohol (RSA) in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“Receiving help for alcohol problems is often stigmatized, and can be limited with regard to both access and affordability,” said Nicholas Bush, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. “We wanted to investigate if regular smartwatches could offer an affordable and accessible way to monitor alcohol consumption. We used accelerometer and gyroscope sensors – tiny devices that are in most electronic devices – to automatically measure both movement and orientation of a participant’s wrist as they took a sip of water. We also developed and compared computational and machine learning approaches to detect and evaluate sensor-based drinking data.”
Bush will discuss these methods and subsequent findings at the RSA meeting on Wednesday, 26 June 2024.
The researchers visited a local stare fair where they asked volunteers to wear smartwatches for 10 minutes while drinking water from containers in the shape of a pint, wine, or martini glass. The volunteers were also asked to carry out other behaviors such as covering their mouth while yawning, touching their nose, and touching their forehead. At the same time, the smartwatches were recording their movements approximately every 20 milliseconds, generating 2.2 million observations of sensor data and more than 1,000 sips by 194 individuals.
“Our findings provide a methodological foundation for future research to analyze the behavioral pharmacology of alcohol use and to develop accessible just-in-time clinical interventions,” said Bush. “Just-in-time clinical interventions are a relatively new method in healthcare that seeks to go beyond traditional approaches. This method focuses on providing targeted support in the moment it’s needed most to both intervene and prevent further escalation of a behavior. In summary, this work helps to pave the way for developing just-in-time clinical interventions that can help people moderate their drinking and reduce potential health risks.”
