Title
Ethanol breath measuring system
Abstract
Driving after drinking is considered extremely dangerous and severe limits to alcohol drink before driving are enforced in several countries. This paper describes a simple and cheap device which is capable of estimating the blood ethanol level from the expired breath. The device employs a 3 mm×6 mm gas sensor based on Nb <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> O <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">5</inf> thin-film which features good sensing performance towards ethanol. A suitable electronic circuit is employed in order to measure the conductivity of the gas sensor and to control its working temperature. The circuit is based on a small microcontroller board (Teensy 3.2) and some additional analog circuitry. Similar devices are already available off-theshelf, however, most of them do not guarantee an accuracy suitable for a quantitative measurement of breath ethanol. The proposed system, instead, has been developed trying to optimize accuracy, power consumption and size. Furthermore, such a system employs a novel gas sensor based on a Nb <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> O <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">5</inf> sensing film, which has not yet been employed in such a field. The system allows one to set the working temperature of the sensor at its optimal value (350 °C) and to simultaneously measure the sensor resistance in the range between 10 MΩ and approximately 1 GΩ. The quite low power consumption together with the very small size of the system make it very suitable for portable applications such as alcohol drive tests which can warn drivers before starting driving.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/MeMeA49120.2020.9137215
2020 IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications (MeMeA)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
alcohol level,alcohol meters,BAC
Conference
978-1-7281-5386-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Lombardo100.34
Sabrina Grassini23717.96
Marco Parvis39628.85
nicola donato458.47
Alessio Gullino500.34