Assessment of vehicular transportation quality via smartphones

Abstract

Despite alternative transportation opportunities, road transportation still occupies an important part of our daily lives. Ever-advancing technological developments set high expectations of vehicular comfort and safety. Thus, it is necessary to develop systems that are able to detect and classify events related to the comfort and safety of vehicular transportation. Researchers have proposed several systems to monitor the quality of vehicular transportation. However, most of these systems are only capable of monitoring either road conditions or driving behaviors. Also, many of them are not easily applicable in real life because of special installation requirements and maintenance procedures with highly specialized and expensive hardware components. In the current paper we focus on the monitoring of vehicular transportation quality, including both road conditions and driving behaviors. Our proposed system, unlike existing solutions, is an inexpensive simple yet efficient solution that is able to monitor both driving and road quality. It is realized on Android smartphones and is highly portable and easy to maintain. Our tests show that our system is able to recognize and categorize driving events with an accuracy of 91%.