Driver DNA

We first introduce the concept of driver DNA: a unique driving behavior profile, a fingerprint that is specific only to that driver. In order to derive that driver DNA, we first need to extract meaningful features from individual car trips. Later on, we aggregate features over many trips to derive a general driving profile. The source of the data is the mobile phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope sensors.

From the raw signal, we derive the longitudinal and lateral accelerations of the car as well as its yaw or angular velocity in the vertical axis (Fig. 1). Sentiance has state-of-the-art attitude estimation technology to compute the accelerations and angular velocity in the referential of the car in which a phone is placed in an arbitrary position (find out more in this blog post).

The signals from Fig. 1 capture patterns that relate to how a person drives. On the same road, for a given situation in traffic, an aggressive driver generates big peaks in the acceleration while a smooth driver doesn’t.

Other factors than the driver DNA affect the sensor response too. Different roads will result in different turn patterns: driving up a curvy mountain road generate different data than cruising on a highway. Also, for the same road and driver, traffic will influence the acceleration and braking distributions. We therefore need a model that is able to characterize driving profile, independently of the road type, traffic, and car type.

Figure 1: from the sensor data collected on a mobile phone present a car, we derive the longitudinal and lateral acceleration of the car as well as its yaw.