In-Vehicle Phone Localization for Prevention of Distracted Driving

A new in-vehicle phone localization scheme, called
DAPL
(
D
etection and
A
larming of in-vehicle
P
hone
Location
), is proposed to determine the locations of smartphones inside a moving car, with the goal of preventing smartphone-distracted driving.
DAPL
operates on commodity smartphones and cars, and does not require additional special/dedicated hardware to be installed inside the car, making its deployment easy and attractive to users and carmakers. Even when a phone is moved from one location to another inside a moving car,
DAPL
will detect this movement, acquire the sensor data, and estimate the phone's destination location.
DAPL
captures the trajectory of each phone movement, the change of magnetic field, and the RSSI readings from the Bluetooth transceiver built in most cars, and then estimates the phone's destination location by matching the trajectory with the variation of magnetic field and the Bluetooth RSSI readings. Our extensive experimentation has shown
DAPL
to achieve an average of 91.71% accuracy of in-car phone localization at low energy overhead, i.e.,
$<$
2.5% reduction of actual usage (screen-on) time.