Human centric sensing by android phones for vehicular applications

Abstract

This report has been written with the aim of proving the reader with a vivid summary of the author’s work and learning experience during completion of the Final Year Project at School of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. For the purpose of this project, an android based smartphone application for sensing based functionalities was developed as part of an ongoing PhD project on ‘Intelligent Parking’ for the NTU-BMW Future Mobility Research Lab. The project draws motivation from the fact that human-centric sensing using smartphones is an area full of prospects and opportunities. The fact that applications are becoming increasing focussed towards the requirements of the end user, makes such sensing using a ubiquitous device like smartphones even more important and exciting. This paper focusses on using the different sensors embedded inside a modern smartphone to develop applications that can be used as useful plugins for bigger and intelligent parking based vehicular applications. It focusses mainly on using the barometer and gyroscope for developing useful and sleek functionalities to detect certain kinds of behavior and activities that a person might perform while driving a vehicle. Through these functionalities developed and incorporated inside a bigger smart intelligent vehicular application, it will help ease the process of vehicle parking in carparks for the common people. This paper also provides relevant discussions and measure of the accuracy and reliability of such components developed in real-life situations through the various experiments and tests conducted. The project involved developing an application ‘CarCure’ for the Android smartphones using Android Studio and Java as the programming language.