Towards A System for Body-Area Sensing and Detection of Alcohol Craving and Mood Deregulation

ABSTRACT:

              Current generation smart phones provide robust sensor suites including accelerometers, GPS, microphones, and cameras. These sensors allow smart phones to be used for various sensing tasks such as activity monitoring, personal health, and environment monitoring. Current methods in clinical psychology primarily rely on questionnaires and interviews with examiners. This paper presents preliminary work towards a smartphone-based wireless body area sensing system that will be used to improve current methods and provide real-time interventions if necessary. This system consists of several wearable sensors for measuring physiological data, a smartphone, and a web server. The smartphone is the centerpiece, responsible for collecting sensor data, interacting with the user, performing real-time computation, and communicating with the web server. The system collects physiological data, self-reported emotional and behavioral state, and other user-context data such as GPS location or ambient audio recording.