Automatically identifying a mobile phone user's position within a vehicle
This addresses the safety issue of distracted driving for drivers and app developers, though it is an incremental application of existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting whether a mobile phone user is in the driver's seat versus a passenger seat in a vehicle to reduce crash risks, achieving 94.9% accuracy in identification.
Traffic-related injuries and fatalities are major health risks in the United States. Mobile phone use while driving quadruples the risk for a motor vehicle crash. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using the mobile phone camera to passively detect the location of the phone's user within a vehicle. In a large, varied dataset we were able correctly identify if the user was in the driver's seat or one of the passenger seats with 94.9% accuracy. This model could be used by application developers to selectively change or lock functionality while a user is driving, but not if the user is a passenger in a moving vehicle.