RideGuard: Micro-Mobility Steering Maneuver Prediction with Smartphones

Although micro-mobility has become a popular and indispensable mode of transportation in recent years, it has also introduced a large number of traffic accidents. Timely tracking and predicting the maneuvers hold the potential to prevent accidents through prompt warnings and interventions. However, the open and simple structure of micro-mobility makes it hard to install sophisticated infrastructures for maneuver prediction. In this paper, we argue that the micro-mobility body dynamics provide sufficient information for maneuver prediction. Our preliminary study suggests that micro-mobility body dynamic patterns appear beforehand and exhibit the correlation with steering maneuvers. We accordingly present RideGuard, which leverages a built-in Inertial Measurement Unit on smartphones to achieve the prediction of steering maneuvers. Through a dual-stream CNN deep learning architecture, RideGuard effectively captures complex patterns and feature relationships from the time and frequency domain. Our extensive real-traffic experiments involving 20 participants demonstrate the superiority of RideGuard: employing a 3s detection window, RideGuard attains a minimum of 94% precision in maneuver prediction with a 5s prediction time gap. The low-cost and rapid response feature of RideGuard enables feasible deployment and promotes safer riding practices. Additionally, we open-source our well-labeled dataset to facilitate further research.