Is There An App To Detect Intoxication?

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Too drunk to drive? These five apps will let you know

Had one too many tonight? Not sure if you're past the legal limit? These apps can help you out – and get you home safely

May 06, 2016 • May 10, 2016 • 5 minute read • Join the conversation

Police remove a bottle of Jack Daniels from the vehicle of a male after they performed a breathalyzer test on him on Parkhill Street in SW Calgary, Alta. on Tuesday November 17, 2015.

Like everything that affects the human condition these days, there's an app for drinking and driving. Indeed, in the case of impaired driving, there are multiple apps, each proposing a different method of preventing you from getting behind the wheel after a few too many. There are, for instance, apps that will measure your blood alcohol content (BAC) directly.

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There are more that will "estimate" your BAC by your weight, age and, yes ladies, sex. There are still more that will try to get you home safely after a night of drinking. And when's the last time a mere app was discussed in the U.S. Congress, as was an application that warns presumably drunk drivers that there is a checkpoint on their route home?

Here are our picks for some of the best — or, at least the most controversial — apps to get you home after a night of "Tubthumping," Chumbawamba style.

1) BACtrack is actually a miniature breathalyzer, and thus is one of the few apps that measures your BAC directly. This, of course, requires buying a Bluetooth-enabled measuring device ($124.99; it's now also available as a totally self-contained breathalyzer not requiring your iPhone), as well as downloading an app. However, it is amazingly easy to use (if I can't screw it up, no one can) and provides easily repeatable readings.

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The most surprising element of using the BACtrack — at least for me — was how much I had to drink to get to my 80 milligrams, and how truly and completely pissed I was when I got there. As I said in my original article — It's time to redefine the limits for drunk driving — 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood is, in my opinion, too much to be allowed behind the wheel of an automobile. BACtrack, like any good app, will store your readings and help you call for a ride — Uber — when you need to get home. Top notch stuff; heartily recommended.

It's time for automatic alcohol sensors in every car
It's time to redefine the limits for drunk driving

2) Endui is just one of the apps created by official government bodies (in this case, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, but many other American states have something similar). You basically enter your particulars — weight, age, etc. — and then every time you have a drink, enter it into the app. Endui then infers what your BAC is.

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It also will allow you to call a taxi should you need one, and even has a little "game" that tests your reaction time and your road sign recognition abilities to further reinforce that you're in no shape to drive home. It does, like all such apps, require you to remember to enter the number of drinks you've had, a stretch by the time you've hit Chumbawamba's third chorus of having another "lager drink."

3) Educ'alcool is similar to Endui, but a little more involved. Besides being Canadian — from Quebec, to be specific — @educalcool asks not only for your age and size but also the gender of the operator; women, for the same body weight, having a little less capacity to process alcohol because their bodies contain less fluid to dilute the ethanol.

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It even, seemingly anticipating a typically Quebecois long night of entertaining, asks you how many drinks you'll have before starting to eat, how many you'll have with your main meal and, again, how many you'll have as an aperitif. Then, it asks what time you'll go home to determine your readiness to drive. Educ'alcool allows for multiple users, will display a graph showing the changes in your BAC level and, of course, will call you "le taxi."

City of North Miami Beach police officer Duhamel Jeanite conducts a field sobriety test during a DUI checkpoint on May 23, 2013 in Miami, Florida.

4) My favourite among all these "reactive" systems is actually from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Despite being the hoariest of old school organizations, it most accurately — and honestly — reflects the needs of the typical teenaged "binge" drinker. Never mind quaint reminders and cheery prompts, SaferRide simply asks but three questions when you're three sheets to the winds. First, there's the "Get Taxi" button — self-explanatory, one might posit, even after multiple "vodka drinks."

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But, if you know you're not to be trusted in a cab without, shall we say, "calling Ralph on the big white telephone," there's a "Call Friend" option. And, then finally, proving that the person who designed SaferRide really isn't too far removed for his reckless teenaged years, there's the "Where Am I" button for when you're so blotto you need GPS reminding of where on the planet someone needs to come to pick you up. This last might have proved very useful in my formative youth. Kudos to the NHTSA for an app that emphasizes utility over self-righteousness. Its marketing slogan — "Too drunk to drive means too drunk for complicated apps" — is perhaps the most realistic anti-drunk driving messaging I've ever seen.

5) The last member of this quintet is a category rather than a specific app, namely those that promise to alert you to a sobriety checkpoint. They are, to say the least, controversial. Indeed, Apple and RIM banned them from their stores. Nonetheless, you can still get some form of DUI checkpoint app from Google. As the name implies, users input the location of any new sobriety checkpoints, which is then fed into a database that all users can access. Of course, their only purpose is to give licence to drinking and driving; no wonder such apps were specifically condemned in one session of congress.

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"We appreciate the technology that has allowed millions of Americans to have information at their fingertips, but giving drunk drivers a free tool to evade checkpoints, putting innocent families and children at risk, is a matter of public concern," the U.S. Senate wrote to the three major smartphone makers in 2011. These checkpoint apps, of course, take the moral dilemma of drinking and driving to an all-new low.

It is one thing to drive impaired by "accident," unknowingly having too much to drink and being unaware of your impairment. It is yet another to, once you've become impaired, use the questionable judgment — what Albert Ellis, author of A Guide to Rational Living , calls "voluntary insanity" — that results to make the poor decision to drive under the influence. But to plan to drive while drunk even before you've had a single drink is sufficient malice aforethought, in my opinion, that you should be charged with attempted murder.

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