Drive Safe Inspector: A Wearable-Based Fine-Grained Technique for Driver Hand Position Detection

Abstract

This paper presents DriveSafe Inspector, a fine-grained driver hand position monitoring system, which continuously detects a driver's hand position on the steering wheel. The steering wheel is divided into twelve 30° sectors like a clock. Our system can be applied on off-the-shelf hardware and works without extra modification to vehicles. In our system, sensor readings from both a wearable and its paired smartphone are fused to infer hand posture and turning angle between static holding states. With both static holding and dynamic turning information, our system achieves fine-grained hand position prediction in the presence of diverse road conditions and inter-individual differences. The on-road evaluation shows that our system can achieve an average 91.59% hand position detection accuracy with only static information, and can be further improved to 94.63% accuracy combined with dynamic turning information.