SenSafe: A smartphone-based traffic safety framework by sensing vehicle and pedestrian behaviors

Abstract

Traffic accident involving vehicles is one of the most serious problems in the transportation system nowadays. How to detect dangerous steering and then alarm drivers in real time is a problem. What is more, walking while using smartphones makes pedestrian more susceptible to various risks. Although dedicated short range communication (DSRC) provides the way for safety communications, most of vehicles have not been deployed with DSRC components. Even worse, DSRC is not supported by the smartphones for vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication. In this paper, a smartphone-based framework named SenSafe is developed to improve the traffic safety. SenSafe is a framework which only utilizes the smartphone to sense the surrounding events and provides alerts to drivers. Smartphone-based driving behaviors detection mechanism is developed inside the framework to discover various steering behaviors. Besides, the Wi-Fi association and authentication overhead is reduced to broadcast the compressed sensing data using the Wi-Fi beacon to inform the drivers of the surroundings. Furthermore, a collision estimation algorithm is designed to issue appropriate warnings. Finally, an Android-based implementation of SenSafe framework has been achieved to demonstrate the application reliability in real environments.