Impacts of Smartphones’ Distraction on Driving Behavior Naturalistic Data Collection Using A Smartphone Application

Abstract

The high number of fatalities, injuries, and property damage caused by traffic collisions, which are mainly attributed to human errors such as distraction and fatigue, has led to the development of various initiatives to address distracted driving. Real-time driver distraction countermeasures have been developed to prevent or reduce distraction before it occurs and to provide early and clear warnings to the driver in case of distraction. The use of inertial measurement units (IMUs) of smartphones, which can recognize drivers' distractions and performance patterns, has been suggested as a possible way to identify distractions during driving. This paper reports on the development of an Android application that collects IMU data from smartphones to analyze drivers' distraction and performance while driving. The paper also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the application and the outputs from the application which can be considered a cornerstone for the next steps of the future research.