New Electronic Tattoo Can Tell When You’re Drunk
Engineers at the University of California, San Diego unveiled a temporary tattoo that can be used to monitor blood alcohol content by detecting the alcohol level in sweat, and sends the results via Bluetooth to a mobile device.
UC San Diego professors Joseph Wang and Patrick Mercier were part of the team that built the device, which uses a drug to induce sweat on the skin. The tattoo connects via magnet to an electronic circuit board which can detect the sweat after it comes into contact with other enzymes.
A project collaborator said that the device could let a person at a party or bar know how how much they have been drinking, while Wang said that the device could be used as part of a car alcohol ignition interlock. The team is also working on a device that could monitor alcohol levels continuously for 24 hours.
UC San Diego wrote in a news release that the sensor continued to work even after repeated bending and shaking, and test results showed an accurate reflection of blood alcohol content (BAC). Mercer said that a user could get a readout “within a few minutes” after putting out the patch that would be well correlated to someone’s BAC.
However, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering told the Daily Mail Online that the use of nine volunteers for testing was “far too few to provide statistical evidence of accuracy.”
Current technology to monitor alcohol via wearable sensors is often bulky and expensive, meaning that the market for alcohol monitoring has attracted a lot of attention. More traditional methods of testing for BAC, such as breathalyzer tests, can give false readouts, especially if a person is using mouthwash to try and trick the device into registering a lower alcohol level.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism awarded $200,000 to a firm based in San Francisco that also developed a sensor to show BAC, known as the BACtrack Skyn.
The device uses trace amounts of sweat in order to get results, rather than inducing sweat via a chemical. Those behind the BACtrack Skyn hope to release prototypes in the next few months, and aim to market the device for around $99.
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