HeadSense: Visual Search Monitoring and Distracted Behavior Detection for Bicycle Riders

Distracted riding behavior is one of the main causes of bicycle-related traffic accidents, resulting in a large number of casualties and economic losses every year. There is an urgent need to address this problem by accurately detecting distracted riding behaviors. Inspired by the observation that distracted riding behaviors induce unique head motion features that respond to the rider’s attention, we present the HeadSense, a helmet-based system that not only monitors the visual search episode of the rider but also detects distracted riding behaviors. Specifically, HeadSense leverages the inertial motion unit (IMU) to recognize distracted behaviors such as using smartphones, attracting to the roadside element, and abreast riding. We designed, implemented, and evaluated HeadSense through extensive experiments. We conducted experiments with 19 participants inside the university’s campus. The experimental results show that HeadSense can achieve an overall accuracy of 86.14% while monitoring visual search episodes. Moreover, HeadSense can detect the occurrence of distracted riding behaviors with an average precision of up to 85.04%.