SmartV: Intelligent vigilance monitoring based on sensor fusion and driving dynamics

Road traffic accidents (RTAs) pose a public health and development challenge and greatly affect the human capital development of every nation. Main causes for a significant percentage of RTAs are recklessness, fatigue or stress, inexperienced driving and driving under the influence of alcohol. Reputed automobile companies and authorities have established standards and/or proactive/reactive solutions over the years to overcome this problem but the rates continue to grow each year. Software solutions that focus on preventing RTAs are difficult to be found in economy class automobiles that are used by the majority of consumers. The limited number of successful applications are either bound to a certain brand/model and/or focus on a specific task. SmartV is smart phone based vigilance monitoring system that focuses on the majority of factors contributing to RTAs. These include DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol), health issues and vehicle defects. The mobile application communicates with a heart rate monitor and a Bluetooth OBDII Adapter. These will continuously monitor the heart rate of the driver and the status of the vehicle respectively. During the course of the drive, the system monitors the behavior of the vehicle for existence of dangerous driving patterns that are defined in Visual Detection of DWI Motorists[8] a study conducted by U.S.A. N.H.T.S.A. The final product is a versatile, non-intrusive, flexible and most importantly an affordable mobile application that captures the vehicle's behavior, the health level of the driver and the status of the vehicle. Real environment operation of SmartV has yielded significant results proving itself to be a successful and an affordable Vigilance Monitoring System for the future.