Protecting Yourself Against Drink Spiking Using Wearables

Zhigang Yin, Mohan Liyanage, Huber Flores

Abstract: Drink spiking means that some types of drugs or sedative substances are put into the drink of someone without their knowledge or permission. Identifying when a drink has been spiked is extremely difficult, and the most common signs can be just obtained through continuous human inspection, e.g. visually and olfactory-based. In this demo, we present Hedgehog [1], a novel pervasive sensing solution to support the personal safety of individuals against drink spiking. Our Hedgehog prototype re-purposes the light sensors that can be easily found in wearable devices to identify spiked drinks. Through rigorous experiments, we analyze the performance of Hedgehog to identify spiked drinks under different ambient conditions and real life situations. Our results suggest that Hedgehog reaches up to 89.71% for drink spiking identification. Demo video link: https://tinyurl.com/hedgehog2023