Have you filed for patent protection yet?
Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
261–270 of 421 posts
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#262You wrote "Selling to the police is notoriously difficult" Why is this so? How do you overcome it? Who makes the purchasing decision?
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#263Sounds interesting. What differentiates your product from others on the market? For example http://www.cannabixtechnologies.com/
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, in an ideal world we would do that. But by the time we come up with a perfect test that can be done roadside by police to determine driving impairment, that has very few false positives and holds up in court, we'll most likely have self driving cars and this won't be an issue anyway. I understand that everyone reacts differently to different drugs. Dale Earnhardt can probably be a little tipsy and still drive be…
Lots of behaviors impair your driving ability. A study found that being dehydrated caused the same number of driving errors as being drunk [0]. I'm sure it would be easy to make a field sobriety test for blood water content, but they don't, because safety isn't the real reason these laws get made. It's just public pressure to enforce moral values. [0]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11547199/Not-dr...
> safety isn't the real reason these laws get made. It's just public pressure to enforce moral values
Oh please. Alcohol accounts for 30ish percent of driving fatalities. Even if dehydration is equally dangerous (a big if) it’s still far less prevalent. Maybe that’s the reason there’s no law about it.
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but I'm also not the one selling breathalyzers either. I was merely offering a hypothetical product that people could work on that would both meet the need this company identified and satisfy most of the complaints from the community here.
I'm not sure what this hypothetical product would measure. Driving ability? If so, what if it was found that that would discriminate against classes of people? How do you gauge driving ability anyway? I would probably win a formula one race against my wife, but she's much better at paying attention to the road on long, boring stretches of highway. But I can't imagine that it's easy to test for that. Meanwhile, this p…
You don't have measure actual driving ability. Current field sobriety tests don't do that. You can instead test coordination, balance, cognition, reaction time, etc. These are the things we actually care about when we talk about impaired driving. So why don't we test them instead of testing for one or two specific substances?
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The basic functionality of a breathalyzer is to take a given volume of an exhale and measure the concentration of a given particle as an indicator of intoxication. So long as an individual's results are greater than or equal to 0.08 then it becomes an unacceptable risk and they are considered intoxicated. If this process is going to test in a similar way, there is no need to test specific doses or profiles because th…
I think maybe you misunderstood @wolco's point? I think what they are saying is that, for example, you might do all of your testing on college age males and find that it doesn't give any false positives for people who smoked yesterday but not today. But you still need to test it on 60 year old women to make sure it doesn't give false positives there. In other words, you need to test it for varying lengths of time and…
If that is indeed what they're saying, my point still stands. The blood alcohol limit has no variations for age, sex, gender, race, weight, time since last usage, or any other factor. It just goes by concentration. My point still stands. What the law considers the concentration which indicates intoxication is a metric based on what is considered an acceptable level of risk.
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#267Does this test for edibles? If a user has THC in their blood stream but not from their lungs, will this show up? Alcohol is absorbed through the stomach, passed through the bloodstream and released through the lungs. Since THC is fat soluble, I can't imagine it interacts the same way to allow for breathalyzer testing of people who have taken edibles.
Per OP: > We are actually testing edibles right now! Early results don't look so good, but that could be because we were using our crappy LC-MS for detection instead of our sensor. We'll keep everyone updated with how it goes! I don’t understand how this gadget works, but if it’s detecting residual THC in the lungs from smoke or vapor, I can’t see how this improves over blood testing as a proxy for impairment; I can…
I'm curious to see how you will test for this because the liver changes the chemical composition of THC and the body processes it differently than if you smoked. The THC that was eaten will show up chemically different than of it was smoked too. This looks very promising so far!
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please cite actual statistics and studies that prove cannabis impairment danger.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/
"Epidemiological studies have been inconclusive regarding whether cannabis use causes an increased risk of accidents; in contrast, unanimity exists that alcohol use increases crash risk" - direct quote from your link.
That study is about alcohol combined with cannabis (i.e. presuming effect then striving to find a cause).
Disclaimer: I have never been a cannabis user.
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please cite actual statistics and studies that prove cannabis impairment danger.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/
"marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively for their impairment by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies such as driving more slowly, passing less, and leaving more space between themselves and cars in front of them."
Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
#270Can’t wait for this device. My daughter is breathing the contaminated air from HVAC in my condo complex from all the potheads that live in the building. Great job guys looking forward to buying this and have the property management screen suspects.
I'm sure this is just a troll post but wouldn't anyone your property management "caught" using this device simply say they used off the premises and that would be the end of it?
Not a troll just frustrated that potheads are contaminating the air in my state. I can’t walk a mile with my kid without smelling pot in the air. The smell and the effect of irritating my eyes is worse than a cigs smoker standing next to me. To answer your question they could but their apartment will smell like a pot factory once the property management goes into check.