Detecting driver phone use leveraging car speakers

Abstract

This work addresses the fundamental problem of distinguishing between a driver and passenger using a mobile phone, which is the critical input to enable numerous safety and interface enhancements. Our detection system leverages the existing car stereo infrastructure, in particular, the speakers and Bluetooth network. Our acoustic approach has the phone send a series of customized high frequency beeps via the car stereo. The beeps are spaced in time across the left, right, and if available, front and rear speakers. After sampling the beeps, we use a sequential change-point detection scheme to time their arrival, and then use a differential approach to estimate the phone's distance from the car's center. From these differences a passenger or driver classification can be made. To validate our approach, we experimented with two kinds of phones and in two different cars. We found that our customized beeps were imperceptible to most users, yet still playable and recordable in both cars. Our customized beeps were also robust to background sounds such as music and wind, and we found the signal processing did not require excessive computational resources. In spite of the cars' heavy multi-path environment, our approach had a classification accuracy of over 90%, and around 95% with some calibrations. We also found we have a low false positive rate, on the order of a few percent.

Push the limit of WiFi based localization for smartphones

“…Each neighboring peer has a unique physical location for restraining the location uncertainty of a smartphone. Second, a number of research work [19,26] has shown that highly accurate relative ranging can be achieved within a car (passenger vs. driver side) or between a pair of mobile devices (at centimeter accuracy) by using sound signals.…”

Sensing vehicle dynamics for determining driver phone use

“…Yang et.al. [36,37] introduce an acoustic relative-ranging system that classifies on which car seat a phone is being used leveraging the car's audio infrastructure. This approach relies on the vehicle's audio system.…”

“…To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. phone for incoming text messages while in driving mode as discussed in [26,36].…”

WILL: Wireless Indoor Localization without Site Survey

“…Location information is essential for a wide range of pervasive and mobile applications, such as wireless sensor networks, mobile social networks, location-based services, smart space, [1], [2], [3] etc. Especially, in the literature of indoor localization, a well-known research direction in pervasive and mobile computing, many techniques have been proposed in the past two decades.…”

“…In most of today's applications such as pervasive medicare, smart space, wireless sensor surveillance, mobile peer-to-peer computing, [1], [2], [3] etc., location is one of the most essential contexts. In the literature of pervasive computing, wireless indoor localization has been extensively studied and many solutions are proposed to provide room-level localization services, such as locating a person or a printer in an office building.…”