Centers for Disease Control published a report indicating that the cost of excessive alcohol consumption in the United States reached $223.5 billion in 20061. Almost three quarters of these costs were due to binge drinking, where binge drinking is defined as consuming four or more alcoholic beverages per occasion for women or five or more drinks per occasion for men. BY OSCAR LAZARO, TRUTOUCH TECHNOLOGIES
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n 2010, the Researchers found the costs resulted from losses in workplace productivity (72 percent of the total cost), health care expenses for problems caused by excessive drinking (11 percent of the
total cost), law enforcement and other criminal justice expenses related to excessive alcohol consumption (9 percent of the total cost), and motor vehicle crash costs from impaired driving (6 percent of the total cost). The study did not consider a number of other costs such as those due to pain and suffering by the excessive drinker or others who were indirectly affected by the drinking, and thus may be an underestimate. Researchers estimated that excessive drinking cost $746 per person in the United States in 2006.1 Alcohol can impact the workplace in several ways;
people can show up and drink while on the job, they can be impacted by the festivities and activities of the night before, and even non-drinkers can be impacted by those consuming alcohol around them. Sadly, such scenarios are more common than people might think as over 15 percent of U.S. workers have reported being impaired by alcohol at work at least one time during the past year, and 9 percent of workers reported being hung over at work.2
In many cases,
these alcohol impaired workers are valuable employees worth retaining but have simply made poor decisions before showing up to work. As a result of their poor deci- sions, accidents are more likely to happen despite the best implementation of company education and employee assis- tance programs. Furthermore, it is unlikely, in a statistical sense, that a safety-sensitive designated worker who makes a bad decision once or twice a year will be selected for a random alcohol test on a day where they are impaired. As a result, the effectiveness of many random alcohol testing programs for detecting these events is limited. Companies are increasingly seeking novel, low cost, and
easy-to-implement methods for reducing alcohol related costs in the workplace. One such method is the imple- mentation of effective prevention and sobriety assurance
www.datia.org Figure 1—NIR spectra of water and ethanol datia focus 45
programs that provide for a direct and frequent means for determining fitness to work and thereby ensure safer work environments. While several reliable alcohol test- ing technologies exist, widespread adoption for daily/ frequent testing for deterrence and sobriety assur- ance programs has yet to occur. Limiting factors have included: the potential high costs for frequent testing, workflow disruption, the use of staff resources for test administration, and in some cases workforce/union re- sistance to the implementation of high frequency testing even of safety sensitive designated employees. With the limitations of existing approaches in mind,
TruTouch Technologies has developed and is com- mercializing a novel near-infrared based alcohol and biometric sensor that is noninvasive, easy to use, and self-administered. Tese optical devices are used as a screening tool and non negative results are typically con- firmed per the existing alarm resolution policy—either locally (using a breathalyzer for example)—or results are verified externally at an accredited laboratory so that
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