Technology

How HandHeld Monitoring Works

A continuous monitoring platform that fills the gap between clinical encounters — tracking compliance and emotional wellbeing every day.

Abstinence & Medication Compliance

Random Testing That Can’t Be Gamed

Our automated random scheduling algorithm ensures clients cannot predict a “using window.” Tests are scheduled unpredictably, with automated notifications to clients and staff.

Nursing Station Mode: Semi-automated dashboard for in-house specimen collection and results management.

In-the-Wild Mode: Fully automated specimen collection and results through LabCorp — used by sober coaches, M.D.s, and drug courts.

Medication Compliance: Daily tracking of prescription adherence with automated alerts for missed doses.

Staff receive alerts for:

✓	Test day reminder
✗	Missed collection
✓	Passed test
✗	Failed test
⚠	Missed medication

Daily check-in captures:

🙂 Mood: Happy, OK, Sad, Anxious, Angry

💨 Stress level: 1–5 scale

⚠️ Craving level: 1–5 scale

🌟 Life satisfaction: 1–5 scale

💊 Medication compliance: Yes/No

🎤 Voice journal: Free-form recording

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

Daily Emotional Check-in

Clients check in every day through three channels — ensuring universal access regardless of technology access:

📞 Phone call: Interactive voice response — works on any phone, including government-issued devices.

💻 Web browser: Full-featured check-in from any computer or tablet.

📱 Smartphone: Mobile-optimized interface for on-the-go check-ins.

Voice Analytics & Emotion AI

The Emotion Blind Spot — Solved

Most monitoring systems only tell you if someone passed or failed a test. We detect the emotional deterioration that precedes relapse.

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Voice Journaling

Speech-to-text transcription captures daily reflections in the client’s own words.

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Emotion Detection

AI infers emotional tone from vocal prosody and compares it to self-reported mood.

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Self-Awareness Score

Alignment between self-report and detected emotion — a behavioral measure that improves over time.

“Relapse is preceded by emotional deterioration. If you can detect the emotional warning signs — rising distress, increasing isolation, declining engagement — you can intervene before the relapse, not after.”

Emotional Health Toolkit

Rebuilding Emotional Maturity

Neuroscience shows that substance use during adolescence disrupts prefrontal cortex development — the brain region responsible for emotional regulation, empathy, and decision-making. When emotional growth stalls at the age of first use, recovery requires more than sobriety. It requires retraining.

Daily Emotional Check‑In

Emotional Self‑Awareness

Up to 67% of people in addiction treatment have alexithymia — the clinical inability to identify, name, or describe their own emotions. Our daily check-in is not a mood survey. It is a structured emotional literacy exercise that teaches clients to recognize what they are feeling, name it accurately, and rate its intensity.

Over time, clients build an internal emotional vocabulary they never developed — or lost — during active addiction. Caregivers see daily trends, emotional patterns, and early warning signals in real time.

✓	Structured emotion identification — not open-ended journaling
✓	Daily longitudinal data visible to caregiver and client
✓	Emotional pattern recognition flags early relapse risk
✓	Grounded in alexithymia research (Honkalampi et al. 2022; Thorberg et al. 2009)

Why This Matters

45–67%

of substance-dependent patients have alexithymia, compared to ~10% of the general population.

“Even simple mood assessment tools had therapeutic value — participants found them helpful in learning to identify and rate their emotions.”

— Krentzman et al., Qualitative Health Research, 2015

The Evidence

Higher empathy = fewer relapses

Negative correlation between empathy scores and number of relapses confirmed by neuroimaging research.

Neural substrates regulating empathy and addiction overlap in the insula and thalamus — training one system influences the other.

— Moeller & Goldstein, Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 2022

Interactive Empathy Scenarios

Empathy Awareness

Chronic substance use physically damages the brain regions that process empathy. Neuroimaging shows lower gray matter volumes in areas responsible for social cognition, and altered connectivity between empathy networks.

Our empathy game presents real-world social scenarios where clients must recognize what another person is feeling and choose an appropriate response. Each scenario includes immediate feedback explaining why the empathic choice matters — retraining the social cognition circuits that addiction suppressed.

✓	Scenario-based empathy exercises with instant feedback
✓	Caregiver-assigned scenarios targeting specific social deficits
✓	Progress tracking shows empathy growth over time
✓	Grounded in social cognition research (Massey et al. 2017; Ersche et al. 2021)

Decision‑Making Game

Executive Function Training

The prefrontal cortex — responsible for impulse control, planning, and reasoning — is the brain region most damaged by addiction. Landmark research in Nature Reviews Neuroscience shows that PFC dysfunction predicts relapse, greater drug use, and worse treatment outcomes.

Our decision-making game presents 8 real-life scenarios per session across 12 life domains — anger, anxiety, conflict, money, family, work, and more. Clients choose responses, receive instant feedback, and build the cognitive patterns that addiction disrupted. Caregivers can lock specific categories to target known problem areas.

✓	12 categories across emotional skills and life domains
✓	Server-side validation — correct answers never exposed to client
✓	Per-category accuracy tracking shows specific growth areas
✓	Grounded in PFC research (Goldstein & Volkow 2011; Hagen et al. 2022)

Caregiver Controls

Assign categories

Lock specific life domains per client

Monitor progress

Per-category accuracy over time

Review responses

See individual answers and response times

Adjust difficulty

Tailor sessions to client’s growth stage

One Platform. Three Dimensions of Recovery.

Compliance monitoring catches the crisis. The Emotional Health Toolkit prevents it — by rebuilding the emotional self-awareness, empathy, and executive function that addiction took away.

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Getting Started

Up and Running in Days, Not Months

Setup & Training

HHM configures your admin accounts, trains staff, and sets up testing schedules.

Client Intake

Caseworkers register clients with drug profile, prescriptions, and family contacts.

Daily Monitoring

Automated check-ins, random testing, and voice journal analysis run continuously.

Alerts & Analytics

Real-time alerts for threats to recovery. Dashboards show trends and outcomes.

CARF & Medi-Cal Reporting Built In

ABC Recovery Center has used HandHeld Monitoring statistics for Medi-Cal Riverside County and CARF accreditation reporting for 3+ years.

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Intake & Discharge

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Urine Test Results

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Daily Emotions

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Medications

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Monthly CARF

Automated daily .csv statistics on compliance, CBT emotional state, and recovery well-being. Monthly work and medical statistics. Proof of compliance for clients, loved ones, and court mandates.

See the Platform in Action

We’ll walk you through the dashboards with real data from ABC Recovery Center.

Schedule a Demo