Dr Yingying Chen, the associate professor from Engineering Dept. of Stevens Institute of Technology, USA presented to EE students and faculties a talk - Sensing Vehicle Dynamics for Determining Driver Phone Use - on June 30, 2014.
Dr Chen introduced in her talk that distinguishing driver and passenger phone use was a building block for a variety of mobile applications. Its greatest promise lied in helping reduce driver distraction as cell phone distractions had been a factor in high-profile accidents and were associated with a large number of automobile accidents. Their research work, according to Dr Chen, utilized smartphone sensing of vehicle dynamics to determine the driver phone use, which could facilitate many traffic safety applications. The team explored a winfrastructure approach that sensed acceleration due to vehicle dynamics to decide on phone position. The system used embedded sensors in smartphones, i.e., accelerometer and gyroscope, to capture differences in centripetal acceleration due to vehicle dynamics. These differences combined with angular speed could determine whether the phone was on the left or right side of the vehicle. The team’s approach involved low infrastructure and was flexible with different turn sizes and driving speeds. Extensive experiments conducted with two vehicles in two different cities demonstrated that the system they used was robust to real-road driving environments. Despite of the noisy sensor readings from smartphones, the team’s approach could achieve a classification accuracy of over 90% with a few percent of false positive rate, Dr Chen said. They also found that by combining sensing results in a few turns, they could achieve better accuracy(e.g., 95%) with a lower false positive rate. She meanwhile sketched the recent study of her team towards a completely infrastructure-free approach for driver phone use determination.
Dr Chen received her Ph.D. at Rutgers University. Her research interests include cyber security and privacy, mobile computing and pervasive computing, and mobile healthcare. She has coauthored the book Securing Emerging Wireless Systems and published over 90 journal articles and referred conference papers. She received the IEEE Outstanding Contribution Award from IEEE New Jersey Coast Section each year 2005-2009. She is serving on the journal editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC), IEEE Computer Network Magazine, and EURASIP Journal on Information Security. Her research has been reported by numerous media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, MIT Technology Review, Inside Science TV, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, NPR, and CNET.
