Real-Time Driving Distraction Recognition Through a Wrist-Mounted Accelerometer

We propose a method for recognizing driver distraction in real time using a wrist-worn inertial measurement unit (IMU).

Distracted driving results in thousands of fatal vehicle accidents every year. Recognizing distraction using body-worn sensors may help mitigate driver distraction and consequently improve road safety.

Twenty participants performed common behaviors associated with distracted driving while operating a driving simulator. Acceleration data collected from an IMU secured to each driver's right wrist were used to detect potential manual distractions based on 2-s long streaming data. Three deep neural network-based classifiers were compared for their ability to recognize the type of distractive behavior using F1-scores, a measure of accuracy considering both recall and precision.

The results indicated that a convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) deep neural network outperformed a convolutional neural network (CNN) and recursive neural network with long short-term memory (LSTM) for recognizing distracted driving behaviors. The within-participant F1-scores for the ConvLSTM, CNN, and LSTM were 0.87, 0.82, and 0.82, respectively. The between-participant F1-scores for the ConvLSTM, CNN, and LSTM were 0.87, 0.76, and 0.85, respectively.

The results of this pilot study indicate that the proposed driving distraction mitigation system that uses a wrist-worn IMU and ConvLSTM deep neural network classifier may have potential for improving transportation safety.