FiST - Fingerprinting Sobriety Tester

Graduate Assistant Research
Software development for PDA-based sobriety tester.
Summer 2002
Reference: Dr. Jay Porter

The concept of FiST is to create a set of tests on a handheld device that can objectively and empirically determine the ability of an individual to operate a vehicle. This is done through a combination of cognitive and motor skill tests administered on an iPAQ. One of these test can be seen to the below, the DAT test. The user must divide his/her attention between two tasks, tapping any red stoplights that may appear in the matrix of randomly changing road signs, and keeping the black box over the red circle. In addition to these two primary tasks, the software is also recording information like response time, standard deviation of the responses, accuracy in hitting the center of the buttons, ability to track the red circle, invalid and incorrect taps, etc... Ideally, all of these scoring parameters would be processed to return a final pass/fail result to determine whether a subject was able to safely operate a vehicle.

This project was fun because I got to learn how to develop applications for the iPAQ using eMbedded Visual Basic and eMbedded Visual C++. This project was primarily software development and data collection, but also incorporated some hardware integration. Being geared towards law enforcement, I encorprated a fingerprint reader and card swipe device into the project developing software for off the shelf hardware. Using the card swipe device, information about the test subject can be imported into the application easily by swiping the subject's drivers license. Cool eh? The results of the experimental data on the tests I developed were not conclusive. Some trends were visible, indicating declining test scores with BACs, but the results were not profound enough to allow this to be a reliable sobriety test, in its current state. I believe that with more research and development, and lots of time capturing and analyzing test data, it may some day be feasible.

This project was recently featured in A&M's school news paper: Sober research