Detecting Ethanol Intoxication and Impairment Using Wearable Biosensors

Abstract

Reliable objective measures of a person’s intoxication and impairment from alcohol consumption are not readily available to the public. Wearable biosensors have the potential to provide a ubiquitous on-demand tool to deliver this kind of objective assessment in real world settings. This study evaluated the feasibility of assessing ethanol intoxication in N=28 healthy participants in a police academy’s intoxication lab using wrist-worn biosensors to continuously measure heart rate, skin temperature, electrodermal activity, and accelerometry. Participants consumed ad hoc standard alcoholic drinks in a controlled setting and had regular breath alcohol content assessments and underwent standard field sobriety testing. The analysis showed statistically significant changes in each physiologic parameter between the sober and intoxicated periods. An XGBoost model was applied to this data producing machine learning algorithms to identify impairment with an accuracy as high as 0.80. These results demonstrate that it is feasible to assess ethanol intoxication using wrist-worn biosensors.