Crowd-sourcing can get some neat projects off the ground. We’ve seen smartwatches, 3D printers, and ways to turn your phone into all sorts of things, but a gadget for checking if your drink is spiked? That’s new.
Launched to crowd-sourcing website Indiegogo recently is a drink checker called “pd.id,” a small thumbdrive-like gadget that uses a combination of light, temperature, and electrical current to identify whether a drink has been drugged, checking with an internal database of information and subsequently informing you of the answer with a simple green or red light.
We’re assuming that a green light means you’re safe and a red means throw the drink out, but there will also be a smartphone app to link to the pd.id to display more information and possibly even alert you of the drug the drink has been spiked with, if it has.
Priced around $100, pd.id is one of the more interesting crowd-sourced gadgets we’ve heard of, finding a way to help people protect themselves in situations where there’s a risk of drugging.
It’s a gadget that shouldn’t be needed, mind you. People shouldn’t be drugging drinks, they shouldn’t be slipping pills into a beer or champagne you’re having at the local or a night on the town, and anyone who thinks doing this — drugging others — is fine really should be walking themselves into their local constabulary for a good long chat about how this is just not on.
But it does happen, and we all know or have heard of people who have been involved in these situations, so it’s good to see technology coming up with an answer. A reusable piece of technology at that.
Depending on how well this technology goes, it’s likely to get more compact over time, and could even see its way into other devices. We’re not sure we’ll see this in phones just yet, mind you, as that would be the perfect location, but give it time and enough hydrophobic and alcohol resistant coatings, and anything is possible.
Until then, you can help pd.id with its crowd-sourcing efforts at Indiegogo, with the campaign set to close at the end of August.
