Price: $1.99 Score: 8/10 By Shaun Campbell
Drink driving is never a good idea. Putting aside the harm you can cause to others – in most countries, blowing over 0.05 – 0.08 could cost you your drivers license. But if you are going to indulge in a drink or two – how do you tell if you’re over the limit?
DrinkTracker Breathalyzer from slappme.com is a new app for iPhone & iPod Touch that helps you to keep track of your drinks and your blood alcohol concentration (BAC).
To get started, you simply make a new profile and enter in your gender, age, height and weight. It’s also important to enter in your target BAC (e.g 0.05). A BAC of 0.05 is generally accepted as the maximum allowable blood alcohol level for safe driving – but you can adjust your target as necessary for your circumstances.
Once you’ve entered in your personal details, you simply tap “Start New Session” in the home pane to start keeping track of your drinks. Tapping on “Add a Drink” will allow you to select from a list of typical alcoholic drinks such as wine, beer or spirits – each shows you the volume of liquid and the percentage alcohol content. It’s also easy to add a new drink to the list – simply enter serving size (ml) and alcohol content (%).
After selecting a drink from the list, all you then need to do is enter the time at which you had the drink. You can add the drink at the current session time, or if you’ve already had it, you can enter in the time it was consumed. Once that’s done, taking into account your personal details - DrinkTracker Breathalyzer will automatically calculate your BAC, based on the amount of alcohol consumed, the amount of time elapsed. Your BAC is displayed as a concentration (e.g 0.02) on the main screen and is updated every 60 seconds.
You can also view information on the current drinking session, including:
- Drinks Consumed
- Time Elapsed
- Alcohol Ingested (g)
- Alcohol Remaining (g)
- Current BAC (%)
- Target BAC (%)
- Time to Reach Target BAC
These are all useful stats, but I’d love to see some more information provided in future updates. It’d be useful to have a warning that your next drink will put you over your target BAC and also the ability to enter a preplanned time for the end of the session, so that you could get an idea of how many drinks you could have in that period – before you start. Also, whilst you can add multiple profiles in DrinkTracker Breathalyzer – you cannot track multiple people at once.
Bottom Line: DrinkTracker Breathalyzer is a very useful and practical app and a wise investment in your own personal safety.
DrinkTracker Breathalyzer requires the x iPhone software update and is compatible with both the iPhone & iPod Touch.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:45 pm
I’ll use this after I use the other wine app I just downloaded – cellar rat.
July 2nd, 2009 at 7:29 am
Did you actually compare the app with a real breathalyzer to see how accurate it was?
July 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Tug: even “real” breathalyzers are simulators and use the Widmark calculations to estimate blood alcohol from breath alcohol. While nothing is as accurate for measuring blood alcohol content as a blood test, the maths behind this app is accurate as you’re going to get without taking a physical sample. If anything, it will read a little bit high after 4 drinks, but it will still give you a good guide to how the alcohol is accumulating in your bloodstream.
September 1st, 2009 at 2:24 am
I would not really trust this. There are many assumptions there and assumptions are very dangerous. You never know how it will affect you. It really is just not quite worth it. It may give you an idea but I would not be trusting it my with license or life for that matter.