In-Ride Alcohol-Impairment Detection in E-Scooterists with False-Alarm Control

Abstract

Shared e-scooter services have become a widely adopted urban transport mode. While most users ride responsibly, alcohol intoxication stands out among the factors contributing to severe crashes. Nonetheless, countermeasures remain limited to single-point reaction tests and night bans that suspend the service altogether. This paper proposes a new approach in which onboard sensors evaluate the rider as the trip unfolds, raising an alarm as soon as enough evidence of impairment has accumulated. Specifically, we introduce a detector that operates on inertial and throttle measurements, with a provable bound on the rate of false alarms. Experiments on sensor data from 141 rides, in which 25 participants rode while sober and at two target blood alcohol concentration levels, confirm that the bound holds, whereas baselines and ablations either exceed it or lose detection performance, and in some cases delay the alarm. At a bound of 0.023, the detector identifies 91% of the rides performed at the higher concentration and 50% of those at the lower one, with median detection times of 25 and 27 seconds, respectively. We further show that an embedded implementation meets the real-time requirement, making mitigation actions feasible onboard, without requiring data to leave the vehicle. Overall, this work lays the ground for interventions that reach impaired riders as soon as possible, sparing the sober ones the burden of a pre-ride test or the suspension of the service at night, while letting operators budget false alarms against user experience.