kenyatta:

Researchers Give Addicts GPS-enabled PDAs To Map Their Environments

To make the patterns of movement meaningful, the researchers have to understand the various city “environments” that the drug users move through.  [They] plot the paths of drug users as they move through the city, weaving in the information they’ve plugged into their PDAs. The result is a detailed rendering of how addiction is lived in space and time, opening a new window on the experience of tens of thousands of city residents.

The drug users are sent on their way and randomly prompted by the PDA to answer questions about their mood, their stress level, and cues in their environment that may lead to relapse. They also activate the PDA when they are tempted to reuse or if they get high. In addiction research, this type of repeated sampling of subjects’ behaviors and experiences in real time, in the real world, is called “ecological momentary assessment,” or EMA. The technique has greatly enhanced the study of tobacco addiction, Epstein says, but “it has rarely been attempted in individuals with cocaine or heroin addiction.”

via Urbanite Baltimore Magazine