A smartphone-based sensing platform to model aggressive driving behaviors

Abstract

Driving aggressively increases the risk of accidents. Assessing a person's driving style is a useful way to guide aggressive drivers toward having safer driving behaviors. A number of studies have investigated driving style, but they often rely on the use of self-reports or simulators, which are not suitable for the real-time, continuous, automated assessment and feedback on the road. In order to understand and model aggressive driving style, we construct an in-vehicle sensing platform that uses a smartphone instead of using heavyweight, expensive systems. Utilizing additional cheap sensors, our sensing platform can collect useful information about vehicle movement, maneuvering and steering wheel movement. We use this data and apply machine learning to build a driver model that evaluates drivers' driving styles based on a number of driving-related features. From a naturalistic data collection from 22 drivers for 3 weeks, we analyzed the characteristics of drivers who have an aggressive driving style. Our model classified those drivers with an accuracy of 90.5% (violation-class) and 81% (questionnaire-class). We describe how, in future work, our model can be used to provide real-time feedback to drivers using only their current smartphone.