BreathalEyes app looks at your eyes to tell you if you’re drunk

Earlier this week we asked whether drink tracking apps would really help people to drink more responsibly, after all it can be hard to remember to log each and every drink you have on a night out. Well today we came across a new mobile application called BreathalEyes, which may not help you drink more responsibly, but will give you a fairly accurate reading of just how much you’ve had and whether you need to stop.

The new application, which works on the iPhone and iPod Touch, tracks the movements your eyes make in order to work out your blood alcohol content (BAC). You turn on the app and get someone else (because you might not be capable of holding it properly at this point) to hold the camera over one of your eyes, and then move it from side to side. It then scans your eye to detect whether you have HGN (or Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus), which is described by BreathalEyes as, “the involuntary fluctuation of the eye as it nears the outside of the face”, which occurs when you’re a bit too intoxicated. You’re then given a BAC reading, based on how much your eye moved around.

The team behind the app are keen to point out it’s been made “just for entertainment purposes only”, which is presumably so they can’t be blamed if someone does something stupid after trying the app and thinking they’re sober.

Although it may not be an exact science quite yet (and certainly shouldn’t be relied on if you’re deciding whether to drive), it’s good to see an app designed to tell you if you’re too drunk that actually looks at the way your body is reacting to alcohol and doesn’t depend on you tracking drinks or filling anything out yourself, which we know would lead to plenty of errors and skewed results.

[Via Huffington Post]