Beyond Breathalyzers: Towards Pre-Driving Sobriety Testing with a Driver Monitoring Camera

Field sobriety tests and breathalyzers are commonly used to prevent alcohol-impaired driving, but are expensive and time-consuming to administer. We propose a set of sobriety tests which, in contrast, can feasibly be automated and deployed to modern vehicles equipped with a driver monitoring camera. Our tests are inspired by research on the physiological effects of alcohol, with particular focus on eye movements and gaze behavior. We run an exploratory in-lab study with N=50 subjects (20 alcohol-impaired, 30 control), and train a variety of models to detect alcohol impairment. We find that, using only 10 seconds of observations of the driver, one of the four proposed tests performs comparably to existing non-breathalyzer field sobriety tests. We make our code and data available to support further research efforts to combat alcohol-impaired driving: https://toyotaresearchinstitute.github.io/IV25-beyond-breathalysers/.