mAAS -- A Mobile Ambulatory Assessment System for Alcohol Craving Studies

Currently, most methods in clinical psychology research primarily rely on questionnaires and interviews with examiners, which could not provide real-life subject behavioral and psychology data monitoring and collecting services. This paper presents a smartphone-based mobile Ambulatory Assessment System, called mAAS, for psychology research, especially alcohol craving studies, to improve current methods and provide real-time data monitoring and collecting. This system consists of a wearable sensor, Equivital EQ2 sensor, for measuring physiological data, an Android smartphone, and a web server. The smartphone is responsible for collecting physiological data from wireless wearable sensor, recording smartphone sensor data, interacting with the users to conducting various surveys, and uploading data to the web server. The server is responsible for data processing, computation, and visualization. The sensor and survey data are used by machine learning methods to build models to predict alcohol or other substance cravings and emotion dysregulation caused by various psychological disorders. The system has been deployed in a field study of alcohol craving and initial data collected from real subjects are promising.