Institution Robesafe Group. Department of Electronics. University of Alcalá. Polytechnic School.Campus Universitario Ctra. de Madrid-Barcelona, Km. 33,600 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) – Spain
Funding Project funding by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Ref: TEC2012-37104 (2013-2015)
Motivation Of all the problems related to transport, security is the one that has a greater impact on the everyday life of citizens, in addition to significantly affect the majority of the socio-economic indicators. A great deal of effort has been made in recent years in the EU in programs of action of road safety, reducing traffic accidents by 40% between 2001-2010. However, the situation is still far from satisfactory. In 2010 there were almost 31,000 deaths and 1,400,000 accidents on the roads of the Europe of the twenty-seven (27EU), which represents an annual cost of approximately 200,000 million euros, equivalent to 2 % of the GDP of the EU. The new White Paper on transport in the EU, published in 2011, aims to halve the number of road deaths by 2020. In addition, poses new challenges such as using a driving style more energy-efficient that minimize pollution. Recent studies have identified the inattention of the driver (including distraction and drowsiness) as the main cause of accidents, being responsible for at least 25% of the same. In recent years, many research groups have developed technological solutions to detect drowsiness, however, only some manufacturers have introduced these systems on their vehicles, high range and with some questionable results. The research effort carried out to analyze distractions has been considerably less. The increase of IVIS (In-Vehicle Information Systems), and especially of smartphones, increases the potential risks of distraction and modifies the behavior of the driving. These behaviors are also key to optimize the driving style. Aware of this problem, a novel proposal consisting of investigating techniques of monitoring the driver behavior using smartphones as devices of perception, processing, and communication is presented. It is personal nomadic devices easily integrable on existing vehicles, which can contribute to preventing inattentions and improve the driving styles thanks to the broad set of sensors that equip, access to the Internet that provide and its growing computational power. This is intended to change the concept of the smartphone device distractor to device that can save lives and minimize the expenditure and pollution. We made the following specific objectives: 1) to investigate the translation of the techniques available in the group for detecting inatenciones, based on vision computational architecture PC, to smartphone platforms. 2) To investigate the use of inertial, magnetic and geospatial sensors as well as the access to maps of smartphones in the development of techniques for the detection of inattention in driving. 3) Develop techniques of minimization of power distractor of smartphones, through the use of man-machine intelligent interfaces to adapt their operations in real time depending on the skills of the driver and the level of care required in each time, always complying with the traffic norms in force. 4) To investigate on the applications of analysis of the profile of the driver on smartphones with a view to reaching a driving style more energy-efficient. 5) Using a novel methodology for the validation of applications developed in real conditions using the application server platforms of the smartphones and a system of Internet downloads on a server. This will allow the analysis of the data provided by all those users who voluntarily and anonymously decide to participate in this research.