[ExI] wheelchair driving drunk

spike spike66 at att.net
Sat Dec 28 19:38:25 UTC 2013


>... On Behalf Of spike

>...Imagine a memory care unit...Many of the patients cannot really walk
safely, so they are in a wheelchair, not really paralyzed but there they
are.  Nothing to do ever, no one to talk to that isn't in the same
situation...It occurred to me today we could rig up a device that would
allow them to drink alcohol in such a way that their BAC could be maintained
at .15 to .18 range... I need to find some nursing home patients who are
willing and eager to spend the last part of their lives experimenting with
innovative devices such as an automated alcohol delivery system rigged up
with a wheelchair...spike  
_______________________________________________

I had some ideas regarding instrumentation for something like this.  We have
BAC testers, but these are way overkill.  They require the drunken sot to
blow into a device, but these require a lot of precision: the difference
between BAC = .07999 and .0800 is so great, many thousands of dollars, much
heartbreak and discontent, in some cases possibly prison.  What if we wanted
a BAC tester which made continuous readings but could tolerate 10 or even 20
percent error?  We could have a device that fits onto the collar for
instance.  

If such a device continually monitored the air around a patient's head, it
could be programmed to know the weight of the patient and could deliver
alcohol into a drinking water mechanism, so the patient would still have all
the failsafes provided by a bartender.  We could set up a kind of lead-lag
mechanism which would know how much alcohol it delivered and how much
water/alcohol mixture the patient devoured, so it would make continuous
calculations regarding what the BAC should be at any given time.  It could
have an independent failsafe mechanism such that if a BAC reading were to
change unexpectedly it would stop delivering alcohol.  It could limit the
maximum alcohol delivery to about 40 grams per hour, regardless of how low
the readings went.

Look at this from a different point of view: what if you are one who enjoyed
two glasses of wine per day on average for most of your life, and you end up
in a memory care unit.  Now they really can't allow you to drink much, since
they know that just one drunken fall can be fatal to a geezer.  So you enjoy
the comforts of alcohol all your life, but right at the end when you really
could use some chemical comfort, it isn't available.  Does that sound right
to you?  Doesn't to me either.  Prohibition went out in the 1930s.  We are
re-imposing it back on those who were born during those dark days.

spike




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