A contact-free breath analyzer for the COVID era.
Drunk driving accounts for a startling share of the 6,871 accidents a year on OMR Chennai. Safe Tolls turns the breath test into a candy-style dispenser with a single-use balloon, hot prick, and platinum electrodes. Filed as a provisional patent at IIT Madras.
Discipline
Product · Mechanism · Public Safety
Tools
Mechanism design · Electrochemistry · Sketching
01
Old Mahabalipuram Road, after dark
OMR Chennai is home to 480 IT companies and 132 hospitals, and it sees roughly 6,871 reported accidents every year. A disproportionate share happen at night, and a disproportionate share of those involve alcohol. The existing breathalyzer culture of police, mouthpiece, and queue collapsed during COVID. The road needed a new way to ask the same question.
02
A contact-free test at every toll
Mandate an alcohol test at every toll plaza on OMR, but make it contact-free. No shared mouthpieces. No officer in the driver's breath path. The user experience needed to feel less like a checkpoint and more like buying a vending-machine snack.
03
Pick up. Blow. Seal. Drop.
I designed a candy-style dispenser that hands the driver a sealed balloon. They blow into it, seal it, and drop it back through a chute. Inside, a hot prick pops the balloon over a platinum electrode bath; the change in current tells you how much ethanol the breath carried. A UV chamber sterilizes everything between cycles.
04
Filed as a provisional patent
Submitted as a provisional patent at IIT Madras. The mechanism is fully contactless, single-use, and designed to fit into a standard toll-booth footprint.