An app that tells you when to stop drinking

There are smartphone apps that can help you keep track of healthy habits, like how much you exercise and the number of steps you take in a day. But how do you keep track of those not-so-healthy habits, like how much wine you guzzle? Well, now there’s an app for that, too.

Developed by doctors in Singapore, the Alcohol Tracker is a smartphone app that lets users enter how many drinks they have each day. If a user drinks more than the maximum amount of alcohol recommended by certain health organisations, then the app will send a notification, that the recommended limit has been reached.

The app is aimed at helping drinkers manage their alcohol intake, the researchers said. They developed it as a way to counteract the use of other apps like “Let’s Get Wasted!” that promote drinking. The developers noted that researchers have found that apps that promise to track users’ blood alcohol content are highly unreliable. The Alcohol Tracker app tracks a person’s drinking habits on a daily and weekly basis. That means users will be notified not only if they have too much to drink at Thursday’s happy hour, but also if, come Tuesday, they’ve already consumed the recommended maximum amount of alcohol for the entire week.

Users simply tell the app how much alcohol they’ve consumed, and the app does the rest. Since different beverages contain varying amounts of alcohol, the app converts every drink into a certain number of alcohol “units”, based on guidelines established by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the United Kingdom and the Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments.