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Alcohol’s a central nervous system depressant. Depending on how much you drink it can reduce brain function, impair reasoning and thinking. It can also seriously affect muscle coordination and lead to unfortunate situations like “drunk walking” (yep, that’s a thing). Or even more concerning, drunk driving.
And now two researchers, Brian Suffoletto, a physician now at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania have released a study indicating that your smartphone might be able to detect your drunken behavior, whether you like it or not.
And according to Suffoletto, this research which was published in in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, is much more than academic…
“I lost a close friend to a drinking and driving crash in college. And as an emergency physician, I have taken care of scores of adults with injuries related to acute alcohol intoxication. Because of this, I have dedicated the past 10 years to testing digital interventions to prevent deaths and injury related to excessive alcohol consumption.”
Suffoletto and his team recruited 22 volunteers and gave each an hour to consume a mixed drink with enough vodka to produce a breath alcohol concentration of 0.2 per cent, well above the legal limit for driving in the US of 0.08.
Then the researchers strapped a smartphone to each participant’s lower back. And every hour for the next 7 hours, the volunteers were breathalyzed and then asked to walk in a straight line for 10 steps, turn around, and then walk back 10 steps.
According to Science Daily “the smartphones measured acceleration and mediolateral (side to side), vertical (up and down) and anteroposterior (forward and backward) movements while the participants walked,” with disarming results…
“About 90 percent of the time, the researchers were able to use changes in gait to identify when participants’ breath alcohol concentration exceeded .08 percent, the legal limit for driving in the United States.”
And we get it, banding a cellphone to one’s lower back is a lot different than how most people carry their cellphones. But according to the researchers this is “proof-of-concept study” that “provides a foundation for future research on using smartphones to remotely detect alcohol-related impairments,” that will lead to more ‘real world’ studies.
“In 5 years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out with friends and drink at risky levels,” Suffoletto added, “they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from high-risk events like driving, interpersonal violence and unprotected sexual encounters.”
Want more on drunkenness (and who doesn’t)? There’s this…
AMERICANS SPEND $10 BILLION DRUNK SHOPPING
And this…
ONE IN FOUR YOUNG EMPLOYEES ADMIT TO GOING TO WORK DRUNK
And even this…
