"Just one drink," you always say …
"One drink," you always say.
"Fine, one drink. Come meet us at Surly Jacks, bitch," your friend replies in haste.
The next thing you know, it's 1 o'clock in the morning, your 1998 Chevy Beretta is parked haphazardly near an empty meter, and you're questioning whether or not to drive home so you'll have at least a few hours to rest before going to work hungover. Problem is, you have no idea how much alcohol that heavy elbowed dreamboat behind the taps gave you.
The solution? A little sticky microchip, seen in the photo above, is about to save your ass.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego recently created the wearable sensor that sends real-time data to a connected phone about your current blood/alcohol content. It's screen-printed with silver electrodes and contains "a small hydrogel patch containing pilocarpine, a drug that passes through the skin and induces sweat," the accompanying report reads. The gel causes your skin to lightly sweat, which the sensor then uses to calculate how toe'd up you really are. It can work — with better accuracy than most breathalyzers on the market — in as quickly as 15 minutes, which is an insignificant amount of time to spend in lieu of a DUI.
Right now the sensor is a one-time use only (and not yet available to consumers), but are reportedly super cheap to make, like in the pennies — so seeing them in a normal person's market down the road is a likely bet.
So instead of ditching your friends and loved ones for a brighter future, allow smart technology to handle that whole responsibility thing for you. Because staying in was never really an option to begin with …
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