ISLAMABAD, August 24 (online): New research has found that a smartphone can accurately detect whether the person who has it is drunk, based on how they are walking.
Many people throughout the world enjoy drinking alcohol safely, without causing harm to themselves or others. Yet alcohol is also the direct or indirect cause of a significant number of health issues, injuries, and deaths.
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use is the third leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., behind smoking and issues concerning physical activity and diet. Approximately 88,000 people die of alcohol-related causes each year.
Estimates show that 5.8% of people 18 or over have alcohol use disorder, a chronic condition that can keep a person from limiting their intake of alcohol, in spite of its negative effects.
Alcohol consumption can impede cognitive and motor performance — the ability to think clearly and move in a careful and controlled way. This increases the risk of harming oneself or someone else.
Previous research has found that smartphones are able to determine if a person is drunk using information about their gait — how they walk. Onestudy, from 2016, used machine learning to determine whether a participant was inebriated.
In the present study, the authors wanted to see whether smartphones measuring gait could tell if a person had reached an objective measure of intoxication: a breath alcohol concentration of 0.08%, the level at which people tend to show poor coordination.
For the study, the researchers recruited 22 adults who visited a lab to consume a vodka-based drink that would raise their breath alcohol concentration to 0.2%.
Prior to consuming the alcohol, each participant had a smartphone strapped to their back and was asked to walk 10 steps in a straight line, then back again. Over the next 7 hours, the participants repeated their walks each hour.
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