Virtual Breathalyzer: Towards the Detection of Intoxication Using Motion Sensors of Commercial Wearable Devices

Driving under the influence of alcohol is a widespread phenomenon in the US where it is considered a major cause of fatal accidents. In this research, we present Virtual Breathalyzer, a novel approach for detecting intoxication from the measurements obtained by the sensors of smartphones and wrist-worn devices. We formalize the problem of intoxication detection as the supervised machine learning task of binary classification (drunk or sober). In order to evaluate our approach, we conducted a field experiment and collected 60 free gait samples from 30 patrons of three bars using a Microsoft Band and Samsung Galaxy S4. We validated our results against an admissible breathalyzer used by the police. A system based on this concept successfully detected intoxication and achieved the following results: 0.97 AUC and 0.04 FPR, given a fixed TPR of 1.0. Our approach can be used to analyze the free gait of drinkers when they walk from the car to the bar and vice versa, using wearable devices which are ubiquitous and more widespread than admissible breathalyzers. This approach can be utilized to alert people, or even a connected car, and prevent people from driving under the influence of alcohol.