Smartphone-Based Adaptive Driving Maneuver Detection: A Large-Scale Evaluation Study

The proliferation of connected mobile devices together with advances in their sensing capacity has enabled a new distributed telematics platform. In particular, smartphones can be used as driving sensors to identify individual driver behavior and risky maneuvers. However, in order to estimate driver behavior with smartphones, the system must deal with different vehicle characteristics. This is the main limitation of existing sensing platforms, which are principally based on fixed thresholds for different sensing parameters. In this paper, we propose an adaptive driving maneuver detection mechanism that iteratively builds a statistical model of the driver, vehicle, and smartphone combination using a multivariate normal model. By means of experimentation over a test track and public roads, we first explore the capacity of different sensor input combinations to detect risky driving maneuvers, and we propose a training mechanism that adapts the profiling model to the vehicle, driver, and road topology. A large-scale evaluation study is conducted, showing that the model for maneuver detection and scoring is able to adapt to different drivers, vehicles, and road conditions.