Distracted Driving Mobile Application

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion in the US about Distracted Driving. Recently, the US Department of Transportation sponsored a summit to understand the risks related to Distracted Driving and discuss potential approaches to addressing the problem. In fact, just this week, the US Government issued a blanket ban on texting by commercial trucks and buses.

Distracted Driving essentially deals with the use of mobile phones while driving, specifically to receive or make voice calls, and/or read or send text messages. Suggested solution approaches range from making vehicles a “mobile free” zone by jamming the signals to slapping huge fines on anyone caught using the mobile phone while driving. However, a smartphone application can be designed to intelligently disable certain capabilities of the phone during driving, without any user intervention. Using the GPS capability, the application can determine the speed of the vehicle. If it is over a certain speed (such as 10 mph), it can disable certain communication features on the phone.

In the US, states enact their own laws on Distracted Driving. For example, in some states, both texting and voice phone calls are banned while driving, whereas in other states, only texting is banned. An intelligent application will take these variations in laws into account. Using location coordinates and mapping capability (maps can be stored locally on the phone), the Application can determine the state the mobile device is in. A static table containing the Distracted Driving rules for each state can be created and maintained by the Application. By querying this table, the Application can determine which features to turn off/on for a specific state. For example, if the vehicle crosses a state border, the Application can be triggered to automatically query the table and decide if it has to turn on/off any of the Distracted Driving features (incoming voice calls, incoming messages, sending messages, making voice calls). Changes in Distracted Driving rules for a state can be pushed to the phone over the air. This can be achieved by sending an SMS to the phone with a link to download the new version of the Application.

One of the technical challenges that a Distracted Driving solution needs to address is to be able to determine if the user is the driver or a passenger in the vehicle. Passengers should be allowed to freely use mobile phones without any restriction. One of the approaches is to automatically enable specific Distracted Driving features (based on the regulations in the state) for all occupants of the vehicle initially when the Application determines that the speed is over the pre-set threshold. A message can be displayed on the phone screen indicating this. Distracted Driving features can be manually turned off by pressing a complex sequence of keys on the keyboard. This procedure must require the use of 2 hands, and should be sufficiently difficult for the driver to execute while driving. This ensures that only passengers can disable the Distracted Driving feature. A timeout interval can be introduced whereby the Distracted Driving feature is turned off automatically when the vehicle is below the speed threshold (say, 10 mph) continuously for 10 minutes or so, indicating that the user is no longer in the vehicle.

This is not a fool proof procedure and a driver who is determined to work around it can do so. However, this procedure should prevent most drivers from turning the feature off while driving.