An Overview of Wearable Biosensor Systems for Real-Time Substance Use Detection

Wearable biosensors represent an opportunity to improve treatment and research into a variety of diseases, including substance use disorder. They provide continuous, real-time data about the wearer’s condition in their natural environment in an unobtrusive, increasingly capable, and cost-effective way. However, generating clinically relevant insights from high-velocity, noisy, multidimensional data streams requires new approaches in real-time anomaly machine learning (ML). We present a survey of the existing algorithms for substance use monitoring in wearable biosensor data streams and how the advent of 5G and 6G wireless communications will drive further changes in this field. Our work highlights trends that have emerged among the different efforts published to-date as well as identifying ongoing challenges not adequately addressed by existing ML algorithms.