SafeWatch: A Wearable Hand Motion Tracking System for Improving Driving Safety

Driving with distraction or losing alertness increases the risk of the traffic accident. The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) systems for smart driving hold the promise of significantly reducing road accidents. In particular, detecting the unsafe hand motions and warning the driver using smart sensors can improve the driver's self-alertness and the driving skill. However, due to the impact of the vehicle's movement and the significant variation across different driving environments, detecting the position of the driver's hand is challenging. This paper presents SafeWatch - a system that employs commodity smartwatches and smartphones to detect the driver's unsafe behaviors in a real-time manner. SafeWatch infers driver's hand motions based on several important features such as the posture of the driver's forearm and the vibration of the smartwatch. SafeWatch employs a novel adaptive training algorithm which keeps updating the training dataset at runtime based on inferred hand positions in certain driving conditions. The evaluation with 75 real driving trips from 6 subjects shows that SafeWatch achieves over 97.0% recall and precision rates in detecting of the unsafe hand positions.