Title
An Automated Mobile Game-based Screening Tool for Patients with Alcohol Dependence
Abstract
Traditional methods for screening and diagnosis of alcohol dependence are typically administered by trained clinicians in medical settings and often rely on interview responses. These self-reports can be unintentionally or deliberately false, and misleading answers can, in turn, lead to inaccurate assessment and diagnosis. In this study, we examine the use of user-game interaction patterns on mobile games to develop an automated diagnostic and screening tool for alcohol-dependent patients. Our approach relies on the capture of interaction patterns during gameplay, while potential patients engage with popular mobile games on smartphones. The captured signals include gameplay performance, touch gestures, and device motion, with the intention of identifying patients with alcohol dependence. We evaluate the classification performance of various supervised learning algorithms on data collected from 40 patients and 40 age-matched healthy adults. The results show that patients with alcohol dependence can be automatically identified accurately using the ensemble of touch, device motion, and gameplay performance features on 3-minute samples (accuracy=0.95, sensitivity=0.95, and specificity=0.95). The present findings provide strong evidence suggesting the potential use of user-game interaction metrics on existing mobile games as discriminant features for developing an implicit measure to identify alcohol dependence conditions. In addition to supporting healthcare professionals in clinical decision-making, the game-based self-screening method could be used as a novel strategy to promote alcohol dependence screening, especially outside of clinical settings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3411837
Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
Keywords
DocType
Volume
alcohol dependence,mobile health,screening measures,serious games
Journal
4
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
2474-9567
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
3
7