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Smart Ice Cubes Tell When You've Had Enough Alcohol
dstates writes "In just 6 weeks an MIT researcher created smart ice cubes that monitor your drinking. After an alcohol induced blackout motivated a bit of introspection (video), Dhairya Dand pulled together a coin cell battery, an ATtiny microcontroller, and an IR transceiver molded into gelatin to create self-aware glowing ice-cubes. The cubes glow and beat to the ambient music, but more importantly, they know how fast and how much you are drinking, and they change color from green to orange to finally red as you reach your safe limit. If things go too far, the ice cubes can connect to your smartphone and send a text message for a friend come get you. Of course, you have to remember not to swallow them."
If they know what's good for them!
... When some drunk pillock swallows one? How soon does it take before the lawsuit?
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
...if my name was Diarrhea.
and no marketability.
"Ice Cubes that connect to your smartphone." This is not the brave new future that I want.
Honestly, this should be an early contender for the 2013 ig-Nobels (though I'm guessing / hoping this is just an overhyped undergraduate project). What's particularly bad is that the basic idea is flawed - it uses readings from accelerometers as a proxy for how many sips are being taken per unit time and then this as a proxy for rate and appropriateness of alcohol consumption. While I fully will admit that there is certainly a market for some device, perhaps built into a glass, that would allow a commercial bartender somehow detect whether a patron has had too many (though even that would have lots of legal and practical vulnerabilities), this isn't it and isn't even close.
Still, kudos for the inventor for trying compared to playing xbox or going out and having a social life or something.
When you do drink them.
As Dean Martin once explained, you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without hanging on for dear life. That seems like a good test to me.
I am officially gone from
People already have lots of warnings that they have too much to drink. First, if you drink six drinks in one bar, you probably had too much. If you are slurring your words, you probably had to much. If your friends say you had too much, you probably had too much. These smart ice-cubes will not help because it is a problem of impaired judgement, not a problem of impaired measuring ability. After a few drinks I bet most people will just put the cubes in their pocket and ignore them.
Seriously, is it that hard to drink and have a good time without pouring crap down your neck till you're shitfaced, grand slam the bed and wake up next to something that needs to be kept wet until it can be rolled back into the ocean?
Spend hours building a smart ice cube, or thinking, "Hmm the room is spinning, I feel a bit grim and that -2 over there is looking like a 10, I'll ease up a bit". Which is the 'Smart' idea?
Seems like if you are unable to monitor/regulate your drinking, you are probably also unable to get your act together enough to use smart ice cubes.
...unplug the freezer.
Their they're doing there hair.
While I feel it is still a flawed solution, I think it would be improved by installing the device in a cup rather than a cube. You could more easily replace the battery and there would be no danger of swallowing the device.
...you've had enough. I don't think this is exactly news.
...you should know when you've had enough by your own standards. If you do not know when you've had enough, then smart ice cubes will not help you any more than my smart rock.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
The use of alcohol
I find that the same amount of alcohol has very different effect in different times. Sometimes two beers are enough, other times I simply can't get drunk.
People who dilute good alcohol with water deserve to have ice cubes bitch about their drinking.
If the cubes count the number of sips, how much must you drink for the number to overflow and the lights to turn green again? Challenge accepted, anyone?
What this summary misses is that the blackout sent the dude to the hospital, and not even 3 weeks later he is drinking it up at a party again. Thats a problem blinky ice cubes wont solve
http://hackaday.com/2013/01/09/led-ice-cubes-prevent-alcohol-induced-blackouts/
We would have used these for "How-fast-can-you-get-those-cubes-to-turn-red" parties.
I drink whisky neat.
I wasn't sure if I like this until I used my Jump to Conclusions mat. I landed on GO WILD. Now I love it! What will they think of next?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
And not the cup itself, then no one can swallow it... Also you wont have to look like a weirdo putting ice in your beer or wine
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
If it's just counting the number of sips, it's not distinguishing between a long drink or a short drink. Twenty sips of a Long Island Iced Tea is much more potent than twenty sips of a glass of wine or a beer. And shots are tossing back an ounce or more of alcohol in one giant "sip" - when they've been diluted into a mixed drink, that one sip easily turns into ten.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
How about YOU be smart? Be aware of your own alcohol tolerances.
_FLUBBER_ !
sorry . . . just watched the movie with my kids
Hope he used char instead of bigint
I suppose the /. equivalent of drinking a century (locally, that means 100 shots of beer in X length of time, where a weekend is not very impressive and an hour is pretty insane) is drinking a 0xFF hexadecimal.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
accurate readings for practical use.
"Accurate readings"? Remotely possible. "Practical use"? Highly doubtful.
Without correlation with a breathalyzer there is no real way for the cubes to be calibrated to your blood alcohol level even if the algorithm is accurate. (which is a HUGE if) Are you really going to go to the trouble to do that? Didn't think so.
As far as practical use, I don't see one. If you need something like that to tell you that you've had too much to drink then you probably aren't a responsible drinker. The logistics don't make sense for a bar - too hard to keep track of which glass goes with which customer AND the customers have to pair their phone AND the equipment will have to be cleaned AND the electronics will get stolen. And if you are drinking at home, what is the point? You're home so who cares? If you are drinking that much, getting drunk is likely to be the entire point.
Please.
Just stupid.
Let the drinking games commence.
You have had enough alcohol when ice cubes start telling you things.
The Las Vegas casinos already have indicator cubes.
When the dice repeatedly come up craps, this is a signal that you've gambled too much.
Another idea that doesn't take into account the fact that a huge population of people are colorblind, similar to the heat-colored shower attachment.
The most interesting part of this story, to me, is the part about the invention being inspired by an "alcohol induced blackout". Come on. Spill. What do your friends tell you that you did during this blackout? Apparently, the worst thing I ever did during a blackout was to try to encourage my twelve-year-old grandson to use some cuss words in front of his mother. He wouldn't do it, but I stand behind my attempt to enlighten him. Oh, and I may have peed my pants.
when it comes to monitoring yourself this is useless since alcohol lowers your ihibition and blocks clear thinking. A better solution would be for bars to use these glasses to assist in monitoring the amount of alcohol a patron has consumed. As it is now they just have guess based on your behaviour, but some people get depressed dwhen the are drunk which I imagine is much harder to spot compared to someone yelling and screaming and tripping over there own feet. When a bar is heavily packed bartenders are moving fast and pay little attention to customers. If the glasses could be outfitted with an RFID chip this would allow a bar to track exactly what drink a patron had and how fast they drank it. If a bartender sees your glass is red (or invisibly to you, it shows a warning to the bartender on screen) the bartender knows to keep an eye on you or to refuse to serve you if your sobriety is questionable. Sure, there is nothing stopping someone from stealing there friends empty glass and getting another drink, but if you steal your friends glass then THEY can't get another drink until the glass changes color and you have someone who is more clear-headed in the group to keep an eye on the others
Next, marketing to alcohol manufacturers.
fencepost
just a little off
Here are some issues;
1. No alcohol sensor. The cube will react the same way if one is drinking water or Everclear. All it is doing is counting the number of times the drinks are taken not the strength of the drink.
2. No idea how much volume is consumed. All it does is count tips and not how fast the liquid is consumed. I have taken 40 sips to drink a pint or one when in a drinking competition.
3. Not useful for beer drinkers. Few people will put ice in a can of beer.
4. Does not work with a straw. No tipping no ice movement no consumption recorded.
Smart Ice-T tells when you have had enough under-age sex.
doink-doink
Next they'll be using this technology in condoms to warn me about STDs or possible men or even pregnancy! Like that's going to stop me.
The G
don't use ice, it's beer or straight bourbon for this guy
This was dumb when I saw it on Hackaday, and it's still dumb. This dude needs therapy and willpower, not electronics.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
Switch glasses. Idea fails.
Finally an automated version of my wife at parties: cold and keeping track of my drinking.
and you know when too much lithium from the battery has leeched out when you're overtaken by tremors, seizures, coma and cardiovascular collapse.
Why not put these electronics into the base of the glass? Same results and no chance of a sloppy drunk swallowing it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
One thing I've always had a problem with is telling if i'm drunk or not.
well, either that or it's extremely easy to tell because I'm a human being with a brain.
also, if there's on thing i need more of in life, its over elaborate things nagging me. PURE GENIUS
A yard of ale is 50oz of beer - I've always wanted to drink a mile of beer, but I keep getting lost before the first furlong.
His name means Brave Dick in his native language. I will also drink if that was my name.
There's no uC or accelerometer visible in the cube, let alone a cellular radio to send the text message. This is either a complete hoax or at the very least it is misleading in that it doesn't describe the electronics outside of the cube that do the real work (over a nearly line-of-sight IR link).
Meh.
I see these smart cubes coming out on the market and only hot topic and spencers stocking them. After 3 months they will be clearanced priced and sitting on the shelf where the boxes are beaten up from a lot of misuse and disinterest by customers. Finally in 9 months everyone will have forgotten about this and it will go down in history as another stupid gimmick piece of crap no one cared about.
Happens often enough in those banana republics where it's hot as blood outside and you're not drinking the beer for its taste anyway.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I can think of a few ways to improve this but amazing idea.
The strongest drinks tend to be mixed or straight up liquors. Bourbon, Scotch and the like are not exactly likely to be tipped up when consumed. People drink those through straws. How about those drunks? Can't they be protected?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without hanging on
And you're not tripping until you can lie on the ceiling without holding on ;-)
First, if you drink six drinks in one bar, you probably had too much.
Heh
You have quite obviously never been to Britain.
fairly easy to have the threshold "latch" so that after N sips it locks into "red" to prevent this kind of thing
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
just remove the alcohol from that and i am sure my kids would have fun with it. of course they would choke on it too, thinking it is an ice cube. but maybe if it flies, has an accelometer, flashes in colors, and sends people text messages it could be the usual way of throwing it at everything in sight and giggling insanely while holding a "smart"phone? just needs some different marketing!
On the video linked from HaD you'll see that the prototype has nothing to do with what he claims to have done.
You'll see only an IR receiver + a green led... but certainly no microcontroller / accelerometer
Blarg! I'll tell you when I hav had enuff' to drink!