Detecting Driver Phone Usage Exploiting Inertial Sensors

Scheme showing how the technology determines the cell phone location.

Invention Summary:

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), “The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year. With nearly 660,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving”.

Rutgers researchers have developed a technology that utilizes sensors in mobile devices to determine whether the phone is located on the driver's or passenger’s side of the vehicle. This is accomplished by exploiting the smartphone and a small Bluetooth-enabled reference point using the embedded sensors in smartphones, i.e., accelerometers and gyroscopes, to capture differences in centripetal acceleration due to vehicle dynamics to determine whether the driver of a car is using their mobile phone. Combined with angular differences in the centripetal acceleration speed can determine whether the phone is on the left or right side of the vehicle. Extensive experiments were conducted that demonstrated that the system is robust to real driving environments.

Market Applications:

• Cellular carriers/mobile platform service that tracks/monitors the use of phones in automobiles.
• Fleet operators to improve safety by monitoring driver behaviors
• Monitoring texting and social media use in cellphones from young new drives
• Insurance providers for tracking mobile device use by drivers as the cause of accidents.

Advantages:

• Low cost
• Highly adaptable method that supports different turn sizes and driving speeds
• Demonstrated robustness in real driving environments
• Capable of achieving a high classification accuracy with a low false positive rate

Intellectual Property & Development Status: Issued US patents (US9936358B2; US10812952B2) and pending patents. Available for licensing and/or research collaboration. For any business development and other collaborative partnerships contact marketingbd@research.rutgers.edu