Usually, the feature set of our typical fitness-centric wearable device feels a bit hollow. Push notifications on your wrist? OK. Count your steps? Of course, why not. But how useful are these features? So, what if wearable devices can be used for more dignified purposes, such as helping people recover from substance use disorders (SUD)? This is what the researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School aimed to find out.

In their paper, they used a wrist-worn wearable device to measure the daily exercise, heart rate, skin temperature, and electrical skin activity of 38 SUD patients. They want to detect periods of stress and cravings, because these parameters may be triggers for substance use. In addition, they let patients self-report time during the day when they feel stressed or eager, and use these reports to calibrate their models.

They tried many classification models, such as decision trees, discriminant analysis, logistic regression, etc., but found that using support vector machines was the most successful, although they did not discuss why they think so. Finally, they found that they can detect stress and non-stress with 81.3% accuracy, and desire and undesired with 82.1% accuracy. Not surprisingly accurate, but considering SUD's urgent need for medical advancement, this is something worthy of attention. Interestingly, they found that the accuracy of individual exercise data in expressing stress and desire is about 75%.

Wearable devices have insufficient accuracy in medical diagnosis, especially those that measure activity and heart rate. Perhaps their model will perform better and receive training in real-time measurement of cortisol, which is a more accurate physiological measurement of stress.

Finally, what really impressed us in this study is the willingness of patients to use wearable devices in their treatment strategies. Sadly, society often has a very negative view of SUD patients, resulting in fewer treatment options for patients. But it is hoped that through such technological advancement, we are one step closer to a fairer healthcare future.

Can't wait to hope that these will become mandatory in the workplace.

It appears to have electronically marked offenders. In the company, you will immediately receive calls from lifestyle masters and compulsory meditation to increase productivity, as well as detox in the company's black field. /sarc

I can only see this work for people who want to voluntarily break the cycle of vicious addiction.

Isn't this true of any treatment for addiction?

Contrary to the opioids that doctors have peddled to patients for years? Yes…

Movement, temperature, pulse and respiratory rate can already be measured with a camera. I won’t be surprised if the camera monitoring has new features soon.

Noble goal, but I do want to know if the low accuracy is due to the specific bracelet used for the experiment.

In a research experiment in our institute, I had the opportunity to use one of them. We tried to evaluate the physiological effort during a series of tasks by measuring the heart rate and the electrical response of the skin.

Unfortunately, we also have data that deviates far and makes no sense, especially for issues involving sudoration. This particular product seems ambitious but lacks delivery.

I think it must be better than AA

If AA still uses counseling and psychotherapy, as its founder succeeded, it might be useful.

Remember, Bill did some guided meditations on LSD to "find his higher power" and understand how he affects others. It has never been purely self-directed introspection.

Bill was fired for stealing money. Bob was kicked out for stepping on the lady for the 13th time.

"I would rather have a bottle in front of me instead of having to perform a frontal lobectomy!" (Classic Dr. Demento, don't remember the singer.)

I would choose Corzo instead of Casadorez once the tray is numb. Screw the anti-interest trip. Fortunately, Bob BTW! Feeling a bit "anxious" and may attend a meeting and let yourself be the 13th step.

A quote from the LSD story? It takes a time machine to come true. Hippies like to lie about their careers, so they are very skeptical. Worse than a thumper.

I sincerely hope that you are rash when thinking about "attend a meeting to make yourself step 13". It's really not cool to take advantage of people who are already disadvantaged.

In fact, Timothy Leary uses LCD to do legal work for alcoholics. I have a paper on LSD published by Sandoz, and I think there are some in it.

This is a drug for finding uses. Because of the various uses of LSD, a large group of people have the opportunity to try it, then popularize it, and then make it illegal.

So the research stopped. There are actually some attempts to restart these studies.

So this is not a fantasy. I don't know if the founder of AA has tried LSD.

Ah, the standard naive (in the scientific sense) way of collecting a bunch of random data and finding the correlation between several degrees of freedom. Given enough random data, you can always find relevant *things*. If it does not have a reliable chain of causality, you'd better have a few sigma confidence before you believe in such a thing. 82% is not good enough—the ROC curve they published embarrassed science.

An interesting related website: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

"Given enough random data, you can always find *relevant things*."

This is the basis of alchemy, modern versions are decorated with fancy diagrams and mathematics, but it is still the same. Theodoric of York lasts forever.

Eventually it will become a probe for insulting the boss.

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