If you overdo it with alcohol, rescue will soon come thanks to Smartphones, which will warn you and maybe save your life.

A study published in the “Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs” has highlighted how the features of modern smartphones can be lifesavers for those at risk of alcoholism and for many young people who are often involved in car accidents precisely because due to out of control alcohol levels. This would be possible thanks to the voice recognition software, capable of perceiving the change in the tone of the voice and alerting the owner with a notification.

Researchers from the University of Toronto, along with those from Stanford Medicine, conducted an experiment on a group of adults aged 21 and older. Test participants were given a dose of alcohol equal to their weight, after which they were randomly assigned a series of tongue twisters to pronounce. The first on an empty stomach, the second after drinking alcohol, and then one every 60 minutes, up to seven hours after drinking.

The participants read the pronunciations of the words aloud in front of a smartphone that recorded them, while the scientists recorded the concentration levels of alcohol in the air every half hour until the end of the experiment. At a later stage, the sampled voices were isolated using software and analyzed based on precise parameters such as frequency and pitch. Finally, when the data was compared with the results regarding the ethyl vapor present in the air they exhaled, the participants’ vocal changes led to a 98% accurate reading of their blood alcohol level.

Such an accurate result surprised the authors of the study themselves and can be explained by the progress achieved in acoustic analysis and machine learning software.

Brian Suffoletto, head of the project, explained that the objective of a test of this type is to provide the means to intervene immediately in case of need; and that the applications are much more numerous.

“A tool capable of passively sampling data relating to an individual as he goes about his daily routine could be useful in highlighting an alcoholism problem and signaling the need for help.”

In addition to the voice recognition software, the application that contains it can be equipped with other detection systems that use the components of a smartphone and for example be trained to recognize even walking, thanks to the oscillometers present in mobile phones, or the grammar used in the written messages of various conversations.

In this way there would be other useful additional digital biomarkers, bearing in mind that the ability to “listen” alone may not be sufficient if the individual does not speak for hours, perhaps because he only drinks.

👁️[WPPV-TOTAL-VIEWS]