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Technology joins the fight against drunk driving

Tue 17 Oct, 2017 / by / Personal Injury

As Illinois drivers know, one of the major dangers on the road is drunk drivers. New advances in technology are being used to help curb this dangerous behavior in an effort to keep our roads safer.

According to reports by KTHV, Faulkner County, Arkansas, has put a new program in place for repeat DWI offenders to use the Check BAC app to monitor their blood alcohol levels. This app uses a Bluetooth-connected breathalyzer, and users record themselves taking the test, which is then sent to a monitoring system that can contact the authorities automatically if there is alcohol present in a user’s system. Officials say that this allows them not only to know the blood alcohol data but also to see a person’s behavior and their environment through the video. Those in the program have to log in every three hours, and there can also be random tests throughout the day. County officials are hoping that this gets to the root of the problem and help to prevent recidivism in DWIs.

As Geektime explains, there is also an app in development in Israel that can detect whether or not a user is intoxicated without even needing a breathalyzer. The app runs in the background on a user’s smartphone or other wearable device and monitors their movements and gathers data about their typical gait to understand how they move while sober. Then, since the app is constantly running, it will be able to detect differences in these movements that indicate when a user is inebriated. Though it is still in testing, they have achieved a 93 percent rate of accuracy. The developer hopes to be able to make the app communicate with connected vehicles in order to tell them not to start when the driver has had too much to drink.