In-Vehicle Phone Localization for Prevention of Distracted Driving

Abstract

A new in-vehicle phone localization scheme, called DAPL (Detection and Alarming of in-vehicle Phone Location), is proposed to determine the locations of smartphones inside a moving car, with the goal of preventing smartphone-distracted driving. DAPL operates on commodity smartphones and cars, and does not require additional special/dedicated hardware to be installed inside the car, making its deployment easy and attractive to users and carmakers. Even when a phone is moved from one location to another inside a moving car, DAPL will detect this movement, acquire the sensor data, and estimate the phones destination location. DAPL captures the trajectory of each phone movement, the change of magnetic field, and the RSSI readings from the Bluetooth transceiver builtin most cars, and then estimates the phones destination location by matching the trajectory with the variation of magnetic field and the Bluetooth RSSI readings. Our extensive experimentation has shown DAPL to achieve an average of 91.71% accuracy of in-car phone localization at low energy overhead, i.e., <2.5% reduction of actual usage (screen-on) time.