Smartphone that tells you when you have had one drink too many
SOMETIMES it takes a friend to tell you when you have had one drink too many. In the future, however, your smartphone could do that for you.
US researchers have trialled a method of using phones to detect drunkenness by monitoring the wobbliness of a user’s walk.
They identified future uses for the technology that include sending a message warning a user not to get behind the wheel or to engage in unprotected sexual encounters, as well as indicating when the drinker has sobered up.
In the case of alcoholics on treatment programmes, an alert could be sent to their sponsors warning that the person had fallen off the wagon.
In the controlled study, undertaken by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, 22 subjects aged 21 to 43 were given a drink containing vodka and told to finish it within an hour. Their alcohol concentration was 0.2 per cent and the US legal limit for driving is 0.08 per cent. A smartphone was secured to participants’ lower backs.
Then hourly, for seven hours, they were asked to walk in a straight line for 10 steps, turn around and walk back.
The phones measured acceleration plus vertical, mediolateral (side to side) and anteroposterior (forward and backward) movements while the par- ticipants walked.
About 90 per cent of the time, researchers were able to use changes in gait to identify when participants’ breath alcohol concentration exceeded the drink-drive limit, according to the study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. Brian Suffoletto, the lead researcher, said smartphones had the ability to play a greater role in our well-being. “This controlled lab study showed that our phones can be useful to identify ‘signatures’ of functional impairments related to alcohol,” he said.
“In five years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out and drink at risky levels they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from highrisk events like driving, interpersonal violence and unprotected sex.”
Dr Suffoletto said he had dedicated the past 10 years to testing digital interventions to prevent deaths and injury related to alcohol after losing a close friend in a drink-drive accident.
Although placing a phone on the lower back does not reflect how people carry them in real life, the team said it planned to conduct further research in which people carried the phones in their hands and in their pockets. They said the “proof of concept” study “provides a foundation for future research on using smartphones to remotely detect alcohol-related impairments”.