Using Smartwatch Inertial Sensors to Recognize and Distinguish Between Car Drivers and Passengers
Thomas A. Cano Hald, David H. Junker, Mads Mårtensson, Mikael B. Skov, Dimitrios Raptis · 2018
People increasingly interact with social media or other apps on their smartphones while driving car. This is naturally a major safety concern, and it remains unclear how to avoid or limit such interaction. We investigate this problem through human activity recognition (HAR) where we developed a system called IRIS, which collects smartwatch accelerometer data and analyses the data through machine learning and predicts if the data origins from a driver or a passenger. We report from a field experiment with 24 participants acting as drivers or passengers where we achieved an overall prediction accuracy of 87%. We further found that various road segments had less effect on the accuracy than anticipated, but we also found that passenger tasks had a negative effect on recognition accuracy. We discuss several implications from findings.