Evaluation and Comparison of the Intoxilyzer® 8000, Intoxilyzer® 9000, and the Alcotest® 9510 evidential breath alcohol measurement devices
Dr. Jarrad Wagner1, Joshua Smith2, Christopher Pape2, David Cravens2
Overview
The Board of Tests for Alcohol and Drug Influence (BOT), a State of Oklahoma agency is statutorily authorized pursuant to 47 O.S. §759 to establish equipment and device standards and evaluation procedures for the evaluation of breath testing devices used in Oklahoma. The Intoxilyzer® 8000, Intoxilyzer® 9000, and Alcotest® 9510 were comparatively evaluated according to the Board of Tests evaluation procedures with results demonstrating that the instruments meet, or exceed, the requirements of the BOT on all criteria including alternative power sources, mobile and stationary testing environments, accuracy, linearity, precision, radio frequency interference (RFI), range exceed detection, ambient alcohol detection, and interference detection. Human subject testing completed provided additional comparison of correlating results with near-simultaneous breath test analysis from all instruments being evaluated. Two simple linear regression analyses were conducted to determine if Intoxilyzer® 8000 results could be predicted by the Intoxilyzer® 9000 and the Alcotest® 9510. Results indicated the two devices were strongly and positively associated with the Intoxilyzer® 8000: Intoxilyzer® 9000 and Intoxilyzer® 8000, r = .993; Alcotest® 9510 and Intoxilyzer® 8000, r = .996. According to the evaluation standards of the BOT, all instruments were found to be an accurate and reliable means of determining breath alcohol concentrations for evidential forensic measurement.
