Traffic-related injuries and fatalities are major health risks in the United States. Mobile phone use while driving quadruples the risk for a motor vehicle crash. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using the mobile phone camera to passively detect the location of the phone's user within a vehicle. In a large, varied dataset we were able correctly identify if the user was in the driver's seat or one of the passenger seats with 94.9% accuracy. This model could be used by application developers to selectively change or lock functionality while a user is driving, but not if the user is a passenger in a moving vehicle.
@article{arxiv.2111.06306,
title = {Automatically identifying a mobile phone user's position within a vehicle},
author = {Matt Knutson and Kevin Kramer and Sara Seifert and Ryan Chamberlain},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.06306},
year = {2021}
}