Deconvolving Transdermal Alcohol Concentration into Breath Alcohol Concentration

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Approximately 1% of alcohol consumed is excreted through the skin. This transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC) can be passively sensed with wearable sensors. The abundance of sensor data presents an exciting opportunity to understand drinking-episode microstructure; however, TAC is an imperfect measure of intoxication. Compared with breath alcohol concentration (BrAC), TAC peaks ~1 hour later and is more diffuse. Still, recovering BrAC from TAC is tractable if one can find the right transformation to apply to the TAC curve.

In this talk, I’ll go over an implementation of one such transformation developed by Rosen et al. (2014). I’ll review the details of the deconvolution approach as well as its potential pitfalls in practice. I’ll then present results from an analysis that uses features of the deconvolved BrAC curves to predict next-day consequences, and compare this BrAC model to one using the raw TAC features.