Objective Assessment in Clinical Psychological Science: Progress in Wearable Alcohol Biosensors

Clinical psychology is a discipline reliant on self-reports, but uniquely susceptible to specific biases associated therewith. Here we review progress in objective behavioral assessment in the domain of alcohol research, introducing an emerging transdermal class of wearable alcohol biosensor. We note challenges of transdermal assessment, together with recent performance gains from updated devices and analytic tools, including machine learning. We indicate unanswered questions for transdermal technology, including whether devices might ultimately produce fine-grained drinking quantity estimates and device longevity. We further identify factors that can impede development of new objective measures, including the tendency to judge new tools against an implicit ideal and consider scientific findings divorced from methodological details. Finally, in evaluating transdermal and other objective measurement tools, we argue for consideration of the specific error type (random vs systematic) generally linked with novel vs existing tools, identifying measurement diversification as a priority for clinical psychology moving forward.