Estimation of Blood Alcohol Concentration From Smartphone Gait Data Using Neural Networks

Driving is a dynamic activity, which requires quick reflexes and decision making in order to respond to sudden changes in traffic conditions. Alcohol consumption impairs motor and cognitive skills, and causes many driving-related accidents annually. Passive methods of proactively detecting drivers who are too drunk to drive in order to notify them and prevent accidents, have recently been proposed. The effects of alcohol on a drinker’s gait (walk) is a reliable indicator of their intoxication level. In this paper, we investigate detecting drinkers’ intoxication levels from their gait by using neural networks to analyze sensor data gathered from their smartphone. Using data gathered from a large controlled alcohol study, we perform regression analysis using a Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures to predict a person’s Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) from their smartphone’s accelerometer and gyroscope data. We innovatively proposed a comprehensive suite of pre-processing techniques and model-specific extensions to vanilla CNN and bi-LSTM models, which are well thought out and adapted specifically for BAC estimation. Our Bi-LSTM architecture achieves an RMSE of 0.0167 and the CNN architecture achieves an RMSE of 0.0168, outperforming state-of-the-art intoxication detection models using Bayesian Regularized Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP) (RMSE of 0.017) and the Random Forest (RF), with hand-crafted features. Moreover, our models learn features from raw sensor data, obviating the need for hand-crafted features, which is time consuming. Moreover, they achieve lower variance across folds and are hence more generalizable.