Treating Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) with Blockchain and AI

“That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

Alcohol consumption is a perennial lifestyle in today's society. Due to the legality, it is a popular and widely accepted habit which often leads to addiction. The composite of a few different factors drives the risk of becoming addicted to alcohol significantly higher than other types of drugs or substances worldwide.

Nearly 15 million Americans aged 12 years and older are addicted to alcohol and an estimated 95,000 people die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third-leading preventable cause of death in the United States alone.

Alcohol use disorder or AUD (which includes a level that's sometimes called alcoholism) is a pattern of alcohol use that involves problems controlling your drinking, being preoccupied with alcohol, continuing to use alcohol even when it causes problems, having to drink more to get the same effect, or having withdrawal symptoms when you rapidly decrease or stop drinking.

In order to gain more understanding about the problem and what our users are facing, we made research plan and generated research questions which categorised into:

We then mapped these questions into sequential order (Research Question Flow), to guid b e the order of research process, which information we should find out about first.

We also divided our research into:

From secondary research we gained understanding on:

Details on information can be found here

We gathered comments and posts on reddit and youtube of people's experiences on alcoholism, some of the trend we identified:

One of us ****attended Australian Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting on Zoom, where there were 7 other individuals who identified as themselves as alcoholics. We did not get to engage but through observation gained these insights :

Goal:

We found that alcohol consumption has no notable benefit for health, especially with the risk of developing dependence.

Short term consumption affects health and impairs brain function which is responsible for logical judgement that leads to behavioral problem. Long term consumption has an even more significant consequences to mental, physiological and social aspect of our users lives.

Our research confirms that alcohol addiction is indeed a problem.

Initially assumed the goal of our potential users with alcohol is to stop drinking completely, however, based on AA meeting, we found that they have accepted the fact that they are suffering from alcoholism. They don't aim to cure their addiction but rather just trying to stay sober for as long as they can.

So we changed our how might we question from how might we help people with drinking disorder to stop drinking → to how might we help people with alcoholism stay sober?

Based on our research, we defined our problem scope

In short, this is our problem statement:

How might we help people who want to seek help for their AUD stay sober?

We tried coming up with few solutions based on users' motivations and needs.

However, most of these solutions were fixated on insights found from the observatory research AA meeting.

Then we realized that addiction is a complex problem. Every individual goes through different scenarios. There are tons of factors or root cause that leads to one’s addiction which makes everybody’s case unique to one another. We also found that this is one of wicked problem in society. So this brought up a concern that we can't devise a solution that will cater to everyone's needs. We also don't have medical science knowledge to try and cure alcohol addiction.

We do know that there are multiple ways of how a treatment could go depending on patient's situation. For this reason, we considered the possibility that every patient may need different combination of treatments that could help them achieve their goal which only medical institution can provide.

Since there are many causes of AUD, we realized that a customised therapy experience would have a better chance of helping our users. We'd like to highlight individuality and uniqueness of each person, from their genetic predisposition to what they usually eat in a day.

It aims to to provide an overview of a larger data, highly curated options for them to choose from. Every completed treatments will be recorded and stored back into the database.

It records and store patients data, successful and failed treatments attempts.

These records will then grow into a larger database overtime. It will offer an insight to future treatment for other patients with similar condition and background.

We make this system to run on private blockchain for data security while maintaining the flexibility to share relevant data across relevant parties; and also a possibility that in the future it can be utilized by medical practitioners and researchers across the world in collaboration to upkeep in providing the best service for patients with alcohol use disorder.

Who I worked with: Uddipta Mahanta Aiyu Cai Saffira