An Oculomotor Test to Measure Alcohol Impairment

Abstract

Drunk driving continues to be one of the nation's most serious safety problems. On the premise that oculomotor control provides a quantitative measure that is very sensitive to alcohol impairment, an oculomotor test previously developed as a portable hand-held Viewmaster viewer with specially designed grating patterns as images was used to stress the oculomotor system. Test scores decreased with increased alcohol impairment along with a large dependence on individual lateral phoria scores. Unfortunately, there was a large amount of interindividual variability, which may limit use of the test for the population at large unless other individual characteristics are included.