Development of a system for monitoring driver comfort via smartphones

In this paper the authors propose the development of a driver monitoring system (DMS) that can be proven useful to improve the comfort and safety of the driver. The system is based on an Android application that acquires acceleration and GPS data from a smartphone, a web server where the data is sent periodically, and a web application to show the data gathered to the user, that can be accessed by any device. The long-term objective is to merge the data about the roads, such as the road roughness, the environmental conditions, and the physiological indicators, such as heart rate (HR), breathing rate (BR), saturation of the oxygen in the blood (SpO2), and heart rate variability (HRV), to obtain valuable information about the driver’s condition as fatigue, drowsiness, stress, and distraction. To this end, it must be considered that a challenge lies in the vehicle vibration caused by the road’s condition, the vehicle’s type, and the shock absorbers, that can compromise the vital sign measurements by introducing motion artifacts. For this reason, the authors have focused on the development of the described above architecture providing sufficient flexibility to the needs of the project for future developments and implementations with sensors for monitoring vital parameters.