Examining the Social Context of Alcohol Drinking in Young Adults with Smartphone Sensing

TL;DR

This study leverages smartphone sensing data to infer social contexts of alcohol drinking among young adults, achieving high accuracy and offering insights for future interventions and reduced reliance on self-reports.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to infer social drinking contexts using passive smartphone sensors with high accuracy, advancing alcohol research and intervention strategies.

Findings

Sensor data can accurately classify social contexts of drinking.

High accuracy (75%-86%) in social context inference tasks.

Potential to identify group sex composition with over 70% accuracy.

Abstract

According to prior work, the type of relationship between the person consuming alcohol and others in the surrounding (friends, family, spouse, etc.), and the number of those people (alone, with one person, with a group, etc.) are related to many aspects of alcohol consumption, such as the drinking amount, location, motives, and mood. Even though the social context is recognized as an important aspect that influences the drinking behavior of young adults in alcohol research, relatively little work has been conducted in smartphone sensing research on this topic. In this study, we analyze the weekend nightlife drinking behavior of 241 young adults in Switzerland, using a dataset consisting of self-reports and passive smartphone sensing data over a period of three months. Using multiple statistical analyses, we show that features from modalities such as accelerometer, location, application usage, bluetooth, and proximity could be informative about different social contexts of drinking. We define and evaluate seven social context inference tasks using smartphone sensing data, obtaining accuracies of the range 75%-86% in four two-class and three three-class inferences. Further, we discuss the possibility of identifying the sex composition of a group of friends using smartphone sensor data with accuracies over 70%. The results are encouraging towards (a) supporting future interventions on alcohol consumption that incorporate users' social context more meaningfully, and (b) reducing the need for user self-reports when creating drink logs.