We help you watch your steps: Unobtrusive alertness system for pedestrian mobile phone users

It is well recognized that walking while using mobile phones will make people more susceptible at various risks. Existing studies to improve smartphone users' safety are mainly limited to detecting incoming vehicles. They are not able to address some more common and equally dangerous accidents such as trips, falling from stairs, platforms or falling into an open manhole. These hazards are generally caused by sudden change of ground. In this paper, we propose UltraSee, the first system that is able to detect sudden change of ground for pedestrian mobile phone users. UltraSee augments smartphones with a small ultrasonic sensor which can detect the abrupt change of distance ahead. UltraSee also leverages the context information of smartphone usage such as screen status and holding orientation to improve detection accuracy and reduce energy consumption as well as unnecessary alarms. We have carried out extensive experiments in different scenarios and by different users. The results show that UltraSee can achieve accident detection rate of 94% with false positive rate of 4.4% and reduce unnecessary alarms by 90%. In terms of energy consumption, UltraSee costs only about 20% energy compared to the existing works that only rely on smartphone cameras.