Sensing vehicle dynamics for determining driver phone use

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 smartphones, 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. Our low infrastructure approach is flexible with different turn sizes and driving speeds. Extensive experiments conducted with two vehicles in two different cities demonstrate that our system is robust to real driving environments. Despite noisy sensor readings from smartphones, our approach can achieve a classification accuracy of over $90\%$ 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., $95\%$) with a lower false positive rate.