There has been a growing awareness of the need for development of new or improved technology that can be used in a variety of real-world situations to get the closest estimate possible of blood alcohol content in humans. Sophisticated instrumentation is not available, affordable, or usable under many circumstances of field- testing, yet simplified or alternative technology with reduced accuracy and sensitivity is generally unacceptable. Clearly the need is for fail-safe, state of the art performance at low cost and greatly improved ease of use. Passive alcohol sensing devices are a good example. During the past decade the required hardware has been developed, small and sufficiently low-cost for integration in a convenient package, but the required software-based computational features that would bring a device up to the desired performance level of true user- friendliness, standard accuracy and fail-safe operation are missing. Successful completion of Phase I will be defined by standard measurement accuracy and by intra-individual repeat precision of the alcohol concentration at highly variable concentrations as is the case during normal speech and breathing pattern and variable distance from the mouth. It is our expectation that the device will overcome the limitations of the current technology used in passive breath alcohol measuring devices.National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
