Employing Sensors and Services Fusion to Detect and Assess Driving Events

Abstract

With the remarkable increase in use of sensors in our daily lives, various methods have been devised to detect events in a driving environment using smart-phones as they provide two main advantages: they eliminate the need to have dedicated hardware in vehicles and they are widely accessible. Since rewarding safe driving is an important issue for insurance companies, some companies are implementing Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) as opposed to traditional History-Based plans. The collection of driving events, such as acceleration and turning, is a prerequisite requirement for the adoption of such plans. Mobile phone sensors are capable of detecting whether a car is accelerating or braking, while through service fusion we can detect other events like speeding or instances of severe weather. We propose a new and robust hybrid classification algorithm that detects acceleration-based events with an F1-score of 0.9304 and turn events with an F1-score of 0.9038. We further propose a method for measuring the driving performance index using the detected events.