My Mobile Knows That I am Driving! In-Vehicle (Relative) Blind Localization of a Smartphone

Sugandh Pargal, Soumyajit Chatterjee, Utkarsh Sinha, Bivas Mitra, Sandip Chakraborty

Abstract: Severe road accidents are reported regularly across the globe due to drivers getting distracted while using their smartphones. To prevent such fatalities, one possible approach is to make the smartphone intelligent enough to detect whether it is being used by the driver, thus providing restricted access to the applications while driving. However, this problem is challenging as the driver can behave like an adversary to fool the system; therefore, additional devices or forward communication cannot be used. This paper proposes a novel approach of smartphone localization within a car by exploiting the ambient mechanical noise within the vehicle. We utilize the periodic nature of such mechanical noises to develop a simple yet satisfactorily accurate approach, called Blah, that can utilize the acoustic properties from the ambient mechanical noise within the car to detect whether the driver or the passenger is using the smartphone while the car is on the road.