Sensing Vehicle Dynamics Using Drivers Smart Phone to Keep away from Physical Damage

Abstract

This paper utilizes Smartphone sensing of vehicle dynamics to determine driver phone use, which can facilitate many traffic safety applications. Our system uses embedded sensors in smart phones, i.e., accelerometers and gyroscopes, to capture differences in centripetal acceleration due to vehicle dynamics These differences combined with angular speed can determine whether the phone is on the left or right side of the vehicle. Despite noisy sensor readings from Smartphone, our approach can achieve a classification accuracy of over 90 percent with a false positive rate of a few percent. We also find that by combining sensing results in a few turns, we can achieve better accuracy (e.g., 95 percent) with a lower false positive rate.