Sensing Driver Phone Use with Acoustic Ranging through Car Speakers

—This work addresses the fundamental problem of distinguishing between a driver and passenger using a mobile phone, which is the critical input to enable numerous safety and interface enhancements. Our detection system leverages the existing car stereo infrastructure, in particular, the speakers and Bluetooth network. Our acoustic approach has the phone send a series of customized high frequency beeps via the car stereo. The beeps are spaced in time across the left, right, and if available, front and rear speakers. After sampling the beeps, we use a sequential change-point detection scheme to time their arrival, and then use a differential approach to estimate the phone’s distance from the car’s center. From these differences a passenger or driver classification can be made. To validate our approach, we experimented with two kinds of phones and in two different cars. We found that our customized beeps were imperceptible to most users, yet still playable and recordable in both ca...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TMC
• Authors: Jie Yang 0003, Simon Sidhom, Gayathri Chandrasekaran, Tam Vu, Hongbo Liu, Nicolae Cecan, Yingying Chen, Marco Gruteser, Richard P. Martin
• Keywords: Critical Input, Interface Enhancements, Logical Reasoning, Rear Speakers, TMC 2012