If you have the misfortune of being pulled over the by the police when driving in the future, you may be surprised to be asked to put on a VR headset.
That’s thanks to a new company called Gaize that claims to be able to accurately report whether a person has taken cannabis or other drugs by tracking their eyes during a short VR experience.
The real-time impairment screening device is a fully automated and non-invasive portable eye movement test. It combines well-established Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) eye examinations with artificial intelligence.
Gaize argues that even if you can quickly test for drugs in someone’s body, they can be present long after their last use. Law enforcement needs a method to detect if someone is impaired and has long relied on observation, which is hard to use as evidence in a case and requires specialist officers.
Using the Gaize system and a VR headset, police have a route to measure and record eye movement to determine impairment and record evidence.
The system is also tipped for use in industries such as transportation, logistics and manufacturing where having people under the influence of substances while working could pose a danger to themselves and others.
Ken Fichtler, founder and CEO of Gaize, said: “I created Gaize to solve the problem of cannabis impaired drivers and workers. THC behaves markedly differently in the body than does alcohol, and it can linger in the body for over a month since the last use. No amount of THC in the body has never been shown to produce a predictable level of impairment, so simply measuring THC is not indicative of impairment. Particularly in places where cannabis is legal, what we really care about is whether or not someone is impaired, not if they’ve used cannabis previously.”
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