Masters

thesis at Signals and Systems autumn 2014

Supervisors: Stefan Candefjord and Leif Sandsj
Examiner: Bengt Arne Sjqvist

Evaluation of All-terrain Vehicle (ATV) drivers normal

driving patterns and identification of deviations
characteristic for a dangerous situation or crash
Background

The injury statistics for All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) drivers show a very negative
development in the last decade with an increasing number of accidents where people
have been killed or severely injured (Figure 1). This problem is now specifically
addressed by the insurance company Lnsfrskringar who recently funded several
research projects in order to alleviate the situation. We run one of these projects
called Collection of driving statistics and development of an automatic emergency
alarm for All-terrain Vehicles implemented on a smartphone platform. The long-term
goal for this research is to establish smartphones as a tool for improving the safety of
ATV driving. One of our main goals with the current project is to evaluate the
feasibility of using smartphones for collecting driving statistics in general and for
implementing an emergency alarm utilizing an algorithm that automatically can
detect a dangerous situation or crash in particular. Modern smartphones can
measure acceleration, rotation, speed and other parameters that can be useful for
assessing the state of the driving in real-time and automatically distinguish normal
driving from a dangerous situation. The concept is based on jalp! an automatic
emergency alarm for bicyclists, see http://jalp.se

Figure 1: The ATV has increased in popularity in Sweden in recent years. Unfortunately, the
driver is unprotected and crashes at high speed are very dangerous. In many accidents the driver
is stuck under the heavy vehicle. In this masters thesis you have the opportunity to contribute to
a safety solution using smartphones that can be a part of alleviating the situation.

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Masters thesis at Signals and Systems autumn 2014

Supervisors: Stefan Candefjord and Leif Sandsj
Examiner: Bengt Arne Sjqvist

Driving statistics will be collected by equipping test drivers with smartphones
(preferably their own) with an app that can monitor the movements of the
vehicle/driver to collect naturalistic driving data. Our goal is to collect over 2000
hours of driving data and make it available for analysis using cloud-based mass-
storage solutions. In addition, basic information on everyday ATV use and
experiences will be collected using a questionnaire. The driving data and
questionnaire results will be made available as input to the masters thesis
worker(s).

Aim
The primary aim of this thesis is to evaluate naturalistic data collected from ATV test
drivers as well as questionnaire results in order to describe patterns for normal ATV-
driving, i.e. without incidents/crashes, and assess the feasibility of detecting
deviations indicating an incident or crash by designing a crash detection algorithm
using input from available smartphone sensors relevant to the application. Normal
driving needs to be defined by e.g. suggesting sensor data thresholds that are strong
predictors of incident/crash. A secondary aim is to evaluate if it is possible to
automatically detect when the driver starts an ATV driving session; this would be
valuable to make the security app start automatically.

Materials and methods

The data will be collected during September to October and will be available as soon
as fetched from the test drivers smartphones (expected to be the same day the
driving was recorded) through a web server solution. The main tool for analysis will
be Matlab and/or other statistical/computing software the student(s) favor. For
designing the crash detection and/or the driving detection algorithm tools for
pattern recognition such as support vector machines may be used.

Information
You are welcome to do this work at MedTech Wests facilities at Sahlgrenska University
Hospital (students should use their own computers if possible).

Major subjects Engineering
Group size 12
Prerequisites Students who have background and interest in traffic safety and signal
processing/statistical analysis/pattern recognition are welcome to apply. Good
programming skills (mainly using Matlab and/or other powerful computing software) is
advantageous.
Supervisors
Stefan Candefjord, PhD Biomedical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology,
073-382 15 37, stefan.candefjord@chalmers.se
Leif Sandsj, PhD, University of Bors, 073-460 66 33, leif.sandsjo@medtechwest.se
Examiner
Bengt Arne Sjqvist, Professor of Practice, Chalmers University of Technology,
070-787 77 97, bengt.arne.sjoqvist@chalmers.se

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