Leveraging Smartphone Sensors to Detect Distracted Driving Activities

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of leveraging the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors in modern smartphones to detect instances of distracted driving activities (e.g., calling, texting, and reading while driving). To do so, we conducted an experiment with 16 subjects on a realistic driving simulator. As discussed later, the simulator is equipped with a realistic steering wheel, acceleration/braking pedals, and a wide screen to visualize background vehicular traffic. It is also programmed to simulate multiple environmental conditions like daytime, nighttime, fog, and rain/snow. The subjects were instructed to drive the simulator while performing a randomized sequence of activities that included texting, calling, and reading from a phone while they were driving, during which the accelerometer and gyroscope in the phone were logging sensory data. By extracting features from this sensory data, we then implemented a machine learning technique based on random forests to detect distracted driving. Our technique achieves very good precision, recall, and F-measure across all environmental conditions we tested. We believe that our contributions in this paper can have a significant impact on enhancing road safety.