With alcohol-related incidents accounting for as much as 30 percent of emergency room traffic, and with alcohol withdrawal being even more life-threatening than narcotic withdrawal, a physician found a way to measure "the shakes" in order to determine the severity of alcohol withdrawal.

Symptoms of alcohol withdrawal includes headache, anxiety and tremors. Researchers from the University of Toronto's department of electrical and computer engineering, created an app that uses the smartphone's internal accelerometer to measure the severity of tremors during alcohol withdrawal.

Like Us on Facebook

Tremors, which is one of the best indicators of alcohol withdrawal severity, can be judged by one as severe, while seen by another as mild.

If a tremor is misjudged as not severe, a patient could suffer from seizures if left untreated. On the other hand, if it is judged as severe when it is not or if a patient fakes the severity of his or her tremors, he or she might be overprescribed psychoactive medication which is usually given during withdrawal.

University of Toronto professor Parham Aarabi, shared that the app they created is a lot more accurate, saying "The sensor on the iPhone is extremely good. We could build a motion sensor, but this is more cost-effective.

What the app does is to chart the consistency and severity of the tremors. Those suffering from consistent shakes are more likely to be real sufferers.

Mount Sinai nurses tested the app and found that 85 percent of them could not tremble quickly enough to mimic tremors that would register as real in the app.

Although the app already seems quite reliable, researchers are insisting that it is still a pilot project.

However, they believe that the app may also be used in diagnosing other conditions, such as tremors from early Parkinson's Disease.

"The most interesting part is, there's just so much potential here. This is just the tip of the iceberg," Aarabi shared.