BreathSafe

IoT Breathalyzer that promotes personal well-being through transportation safety and healthy drinking habits.

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Inspiration

To help minimize the number of intoxicated people behind the wheel around the world by creating a device that promotes drinking safety and awareness of personal drinking habits.

What it does

BreathSafe uses a Bluetooth-enable Arduino 101 paired with an alcohol sensor to detect users' Blood Alcohol Concentrations and shares the data to an Android app. The app determines whether or not the user is eligible to drive and makes recommended actions for intoxicated users such as locking their car (Tesla), hailing a Lyft taxi, or calling an important contact for help. Additionally, for those that do not have the hardware device, you can enter in the number of drinks you've had and it can approximate the Breathalyzer data, to provide the same recommendations. Also, it builds a database of your past drinking history, providing analytical data to help individuals refine how much, or how little they want to drink on a daily, weekly, and monthly bases.

How we built it

Our project has independent software and hardware components that both can be used alone, or in conjunction. We built our software on the android studio IDE to implement a companion app for our breathalyzer that focuses on maximizing the safety of the recreational drinking. By teaching user's how to comfortably limit themselves, and reminding them when they are not qualified to drive a vehicle we can ensure a safer, and therefore more enjoyable, experience for all users. The hardware, built using Arduino 101, Adafruit ethanol sensor, soder iron and a protoboard, displays relative ethanol readings through LED's to inform user's, even if they cannot access their phones application, an approximate BAC level to remind them to consider their safety. In conjunction through a Bluetooth Low energy connection these two components can change how people approach drinking for the better.

Challenges we ran into

As a group of high school novices, MHacks was an enthralling challenge that we all enjoyed. 3/4 members of our team had never used Android Studio before and over the 36 hour weekend we learned a lot. One specific problem we encountered was extremely sparse and vague the documentation for connecting an Android app to a Low Energy Bluetooth device. Also, it wasn't clear that Arduino 101's Bluetooth low energy is incompatible with the Android Studio's regular Bluetooth API's and we implemented the regular Bluetooth and were confused why they were unable to connect. Additionally, our first alcohol sensor, the MQ-3 from Sparkfun required a 24 hour preheat period to produce any accurate data-benchmarks that we couldn't understand in the non-English datasheets Sparkfun's documentation links to. Luckily, we also brought an Ada-fruit multi-gas sensor with compatibility for ethanol which was much more compatible for our final product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our app implements relevant APIs, like Lyft, Tesla, and Twilio to enable broad functionality. Additionally, using the chemistry property's of vapor pressure and the ideal gas law we were able to calibrate our alcohol sensor to detect gas robustly.

What we learned

First of all, being a part of the excited learning atmosphere with college students and companies taught us a lot about the amazing community surrounding computer engineering and hacks, and motivated us for applying to schools for those majors. In terms of our project: We learned about various methods to integrate Bluetooth capabilities into an Android app, but more importantly, how to work together as a single unit and utilize our individual strengths to create our best possible final product.

What's next for BreathSafe

We hope to miniaturize our sensor for more portability, improve the connection between our app and the sensor, and use database analysis to provide personalized information on alcohol tolerance and improve accuracy, possible with machine learning such as Tensor-flow. Also since we offer users to input specific drink amount every-time they use the Breathalyzer, we could build a dynamic service to analyze individual tolerance and improve for each user as they continue to use our application. If we could miniaturize our product significantly, we would like to build the breathalyzer directly into car key fobs, ensuring drivers safety before they take out their cars.

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