POFS: A novel pedestrian-oriented forewarning system for vulnerable pedestrian safety

Abstract

As the popularity of the smartphone is increasing, the number of people getting involved in accidents with vehicles while using their smartphones is also increasing. Pedestrians divert their attention from walking because of the attraction of smartphone, which causes the accidents. It is critical to design a pedestrian-oriented system to alert the pedestrian smartphone users to imminent dangers while they are immersed in their smartphones. In this paper, a novel Pedestrian-Oriented Forewarning System (POFS) is proposed to protect the distracted vulnerable pedestrians. POFS divides the states of smartphone into four kinds: screen-centric state, voice-centric state, screen-voice state and silent state, and provides the adaptive alert mode on the basis of specific state. An on board unit (OBU) which can achieve IEEE 802.11p and the traditional Wi-Fi protocols is proposed to support the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication at the same time. An efficient collision estimation algorithm is proposed to provide reliable alert for pedestrian. Experimental studies show that POFS can alert the pedestrian using the efficient alert.

Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Communication for Vulnerable Road Users: Survey, Design Considerations, and Challenges

“…Multiple efforts have been made to research and design V2P crash prevention systems for aforementioned pedestrian groups [3,4,5,9,15,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. These efforts use various approaches to achieve their goal of V2P system.…”

“…This may be achieved by equipping the devices with multiple communication technologies and designing the system that may leverage the capabilities of these technologies. References [5,25] are a few examples of the V2P systems for VRUs that use the hybrid mode of communication. This mode may overcome the limitations of direct and indirect modes i.e., communication range and communication latency respectively.…”

“…A few efforts [5,25,38] have been made to design V2P safety systems using cellular technology. All of the efforts use 3G or Long Term Evolution (LTE) for communication and smartphones as a VRU device.…”

Pedestrian walking safety system based on smartphone built‐in sensors

“…The authors of [10] design LookUp that uses shoe‐mounted inertial sensors for location classification based on the surface gradient profile and step patterns. In [11], the authors propose a pedestrian‐oriented forewarning system FOSF to provide forewarning alert for smartphone users using the data including location, speed, and travel direction collected from smartphones. The authors of [12] implement pSafety , a collision prevention system instantaneously informs pedestrians and drivers of the potential threatening accidents.…”

“…To increase the safety of pedestrian mobile phone users, a variety of research works have been conducted, which can be categorised into pedestrian‐surrounding safety studies and pedestrian‐behaviour safety investigations. For pedestrian‐surrounding safety studies, the authors propose Surround‐see [8], UltraSee [9], LookUp [10], FOSF [11], pSafety [12], CrowdWatch [13], Bumpalert [14]. However, most of these systems mainly rely on surrounding environments of pedestrians, but do not address pedestrians' carelessness.…”