Alcohol Research and eHealth Technology

The rapid advance of electronic technology holds the promise for revolu­ tionary improvements in conducting research on alcohol use disorders as well as innovative methods for prevention and treatment. This issue of Alcohol Research: Current Reviews reports on the state of the science and future directions in electronic health (eHealth) technologies and their potential impact on alcohol epidemiology, prevention, and treatment. As an evolving transdisciplinary field, eHealth is poised to transform theories of behavioral change and models of behavioral health care. eHealth brings real-time, in-the-moment monitoring of bodily and cognitive states and enables us to deliver personalized “just-in-time” interventions. eHealth includes mobile health (mHealth) and covers, for example, devices (e.g., computers, smart phones, tablets) for monitoring and delivery of information and interventions; sensors (e.g., geographical positioning system [GPS], accelerometers, glucose and heart rate monitors, transdermal alcohol sensors); Internet and social media (e.g., text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, chat rooms, Internet support groups, Instagram); computerized interventions (e.g., see the articles by Bickel and by Carroll); eHealth “apps” (Aguilera and Muench 2012); and the integration of multiple technology types in seamlessly coordinated health care platforms (e.g., see the article by Quanbeck). The lexicon describing these new technologies also is evolving (Eysenbach 2001; Oh et al. 2005), such that the term “digital health technologies,” which subsumes eHealth and mHealth and encompasses health informa­ tion technology and personal genomics (Topol 2012), is now becoming more mainstream. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a variety of activities reflect the NIH’s belief that eHealth will become a core component of personalized medicine. Specifically, the NIH Wireless Medical Technologies Working Group coordinates mHealth activities across Institutes to accelerate the translation of advances in eHealth to personalized care. The NIH also coordinates the mHealth Summit, an annual meeting that facilitates collaboration on wireless health technology development and application among academia, the private sector, and health care providers (Nilsen et al. 2013). At NIAAA, research initiatives include funding opportunities, in conjunction with Collaborative Research on Addiction (CRAN), on the use of social media to address alcohol and other substance use and the use of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to study mechanisms of behavior change in alcohol treatment. Reviews in this issue highlight how eHealth technologies are changing our thinking about public health surveillance and the collection of data for alcohol research (see the articles by Beckjord and by Freisthler) and beginning to transform clinical practice across the continuum of care (see the articles by Cronce, by Harris, and by Quanbeck). With such extensive access to