A Fuzzy-Logic Approach to Dynamic Bayesian Severity Level Classification of Driver Distraction Using Image Recognition

open access articleDetecting and classifying driver distractions is crucial in the prevention of road accidents. These distractions impact both driver behavior and vehicle dynamics. Knowing the degree of driver distraction can aid in accident prevention techniques, including transitioning of control to a level 4 semi- autonomous vehicle, when a high distraction severity level is reached. Thus, enhancement of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADAS) is a critical component in the safety of vehicle drivers and other road users. In this paper, a new methodology is introduced, using an expert knowledge rule system to predict the severity of distraction in a contiguous set of video frames using the Naturalistic Driving American University of Cairo (AUC) Distraction Dataset. A multi-class distraction system comprises the face orientation, drivers’ activities, hands and previous driver distraction, a severity classification model is developed as a discrete dynamic Bayesian (DDB). Furthermore, a Mamdani-based fuzzy system was implemented to detect multi- class of distractions into a severity level of safe, careless or dangerous driving. Thus, if a high level of severity is reached the semi-autonomous vehicle will take control. The result further shows that some instances of driver’s distraction may quickly transition from a careless to dangerous driving in a multi-class distraction context

Does Driver Safety Education have an Impact on Texting While Driving?

In today’s society, Americans are more connected than ever. Gone are the days of pulling to the side of the road in order to find a pay phone to call for help, check in with family or find an address of a business in the yellow pages. All these tasks can now be accomplished while driving down the road. Most Americans have become accustomed to driving with distractions; changing the radio station, eating a snack or carrying on an in car conversation with passengers. Many profess that these distractions can be accomplished while maintaining an awareness of traffic conditions and eye contact on the road ahead. The driver of today is surrounded by technology that takes their attention away from the road; checking navigation systems, starting a movie for passengers or reading/sending text messages to family and friends. As automobilists take to the road in the 21rst century, they will not only be faced with the continued threat of drunk drivers and those that complete daily tasks that should be accomplished in a bathroom, but now will have to contend with the driver who is distracted by reading or sending a text. While many of these drivers are teenagers and young adults, distracted driving is not limited to young drivers. This new phenomena is rapidly moving to the forefront of public safety. The purpose of this study was to determine if a driver safety education class could positively affect the perceptions of drivers with regard to texting while driving. The study was a quantitative, repeated measures quasi-experimental design. The hypothesis was a driver safety education class focusing on the hazards of texting and driving, would improve distracted driving perceptions in middle school teachers. The results showed a change in driver perceptions of the hazards associated with texting and driving. The driver safety education had a positive influence on the participants of the study. Further, the effects of the educational intervention continued to have a positive influence four weeks post education

Correlations Between Human Mobility and Social Interaction Reveal General Activity Patterns

A day in the life of a person involves a broad range of activities which are common across many people. Going beyond diurnal cycles, a central question is: to what extent do individuals act according to patterns shared across an entire population? Here we investigate the interplay between different activity types, namely communication, motion, and physical proximity by analyzing data collected from smartphones distributed among 638 individuals. We explore two central questions: Which underlying principles govern the formation of the activity patterns? Are the patterns specific to each individual or shared across the entire population? We find that statistics of the entire population allows us to successfully predict 71\% of the activity and 85\% of the inactivity involved in communication, mobility, and physical proximity. Surprisingly, individual level statistics only result in marginally better predictions, indicating that a majority of activity patterns are shared across {our sample population}. Finally, we predict short-term activity patterns using a generalized linear model, which suggests that a simple linear description might be sufficient to explain a wide range of actions, whether they be of social or of physical character

Teaching Texting on a Smart Phone to Children and Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Children and adolescents diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in social communication ( Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -5th edition, APA, 2013). These deficits are significantly pronounced when individuals with ASD attempt to engage in conversations. Due to advances in technology, children and adolescents are now conversing through computer mediated communication (CMC; Pew, 2015, 2018). Texting in particular is one popular form of CMC that may mitigate the non-verbal social skill deficits seen in individuals with ASD, such as eye contact and tone of voice. Despite the potential of texting and its\u27 popularity as a CMC medium among typically developing children and adolescents, no research currently exists on teaching texting to individuals with ASD. The present study therefore aimed to increase the social communication skills of the participants by teaching five children and adolescents with ASD to maintain a back and forth conversation through text. This study was a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across dyads. The study involved two texting interventions; the first focused on the steps needed to send a text and the second examined teaching texting content. The texting step intervention was taught using a total-task chaining procedure to teach each of the steps illustrated in the texting guidebook, which was designed specifically for the current study. The second intervention used a multiple exemplar approach (two conversation samples) that were interspersed across sessions and participants. Both interventions were implemented using the guidebooks combined with prompting. The participants were paired together, resulting in three dyads. In two of the dyads, both of the participants had an ASD diagnosis. The third dyad included one participant with ASD and one typically developing peer. Training sessions were conducted in a lounge setting at an after-school behavioral treatment center and in the children’s respective homes. Generalization texting partner probes, FaceTime® probes, as well as one-month maintenance probes were also collected. Overall, results demonstrated that during baseline, all five of the children texted appropriately at low rates; in addition, one of the five participants also did not consistently complete all the steps required to send a text. Following the texting content intervention, all five of the participants reached the criterion for appropriate texting content. The one participant, who also received the texting steps intervention, met criterion for both interventions. All five participants also met the fading criterion and continued to demonstrate the two skills on their two weekly independent text conversations. They also all generalized across texting partners (from their peers to their parents/siblings) and maintained the behavior one month following treatment. In addition, the ancillary variable of percentage of appropriate verbal content spoken during FaceTime® was examined. All five children demonstrated low levels of appropriate verbal content in their FaceTime® probes prior to the texting intervention, and all demonstrated an increase in appropriate content following the texting intervention and during follow up. Lastly, strong social validity data was gained through examining pre and post surveys for parents and participants that asked about their current texting habits and their interest in learning to text with more people. Additional, social validity data was gained by having naïve raters score a sample of the conversations to assess the appropriateness of the conversations in terms of replicating the style of conversations typically developing children engage in. The results taken together suggest the potential benefit of teaching children and adolescents with ASD to communicate through text. Future research should replicate this study to validate and expand upon these findings

Young Adults’ Cellphone Dependence, Stress, Depression and Self-Esteem

Cellphones have become an indispensable communication device, especially for young adults. Based on an online survey conducted in the Midwest, USA, the current study examined young adults’ (N = 1,659, M age = 19.38, SD = 1.71) use of cellphone and its influence on their psychosocial states. Almost 90% of the participants owned their first cellphone at age 14 or younger; 96.5% of the cellphone owners were smartphone users. Women spent significantly longer time for both voice calling and texting, were more cellphone dependent, stressed and depressed than men. Both men and women spent significantly more time for texting than voice calling. Path analysis revealed that the time spent for texting and the fear of social isolation for being a non-texting user predicted cellphone dependence, which subsequently predicted self-esteem; the latter relationship was mediated by the level of perceived stress and depression. Implications of the findings are discussed

An exploration into the use of the digital platform Slack to support group assessments and feedback and the impact on engagement - Working Paper

Funded by Teaching Innovation Project (DMU)Assessment and feedback is consistently highlighted as an area where students feel Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) could improve and regularly scores lowest of the key criteria for student satisfaction (Grove, 2014). Furthermore, group assessment, where students not only need to learn assessment requirements, but also social skills required to work collaboratively (Reiser, 2017), can create additional challenges. The majority of university students have grown up as digital natives, with 81% of students reporting use of mobile devices whilst studying (Al-Emran, Elsherif & Shaalan, 2016). There is a requirement to consider more brave and innovative technological approaches to supporting students. This working paper explores whether adopting an industry tool Slack, a Computer-Mediated Communication platform, can be an effective tool in group assessments. More specifically, can Slack facilitate an innovative and collaborative group learning community for mediating and supporting group assessments amongst level 5 undergraduate marketing students and additionally develop graduate competencies. Proposing a programme of qualitative inquiry, using a multi-method case study approach, data will be collected through six focus groups of 8-10 students and two semi-structured individual interviews with members of the teaching team in order to evaluate the use of Slack in supporting and engaging students in group assessments

Media use during adolescence: the recommendations of the Italian Pediatric Society.

BACKGROUND: The use of media device, such as smartphone and tablet, is currently increasing, especially among the youngest. Adolescents spend more and more time with their smartphones consulting social media, mainly Facebook, Instagram and Twitter because. Adolescents often feel the necessity to use a media device as a means to construct a social identity and express themselves. For some children, smartphone ownership starts even sooner as young as 7 yrs, according to internet safety experts. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We analyzed the evidence on media use and its consequences in adolescence. RESULTS: In literature, smartphones and tablets use may negatively influences the psychophysical development of the adolescent, such as learning, sleep and sigh. Moreover, obesity, distraction, addiction, cyberbullism and Hikikomori phenomena are described in adolescents who use media device too frequently. The Italian Pediatric Society provide action-oriented recommendations for families and clinicians to avoid negative outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Both parents and clinicians should be aware of the widespread phenomenon of media device use among adolescents and try to avoid psychophysical consequences on the youngest

Mobile phones in the classroom: Policies and potential pedagogy

Many university instructors (76% of our survey) have a mobile phone policy in their classrooms, due to the distractions of unregulated use. Yet only about half of those who ask students to put down their phones report that these policies are effective. Given that students want to and will use their phones, are instructors taking the opportunity to integrate these mobile devices as a part of media literacy or other pedagogy? We conducted a nationwide survey of more than 150 college instructors to explicate what policies are used, and where they come from; how they are enforced (e.g. rewards and punishments); and for those instructors who use mobile phones in instruction, whether and how the technology is used for academic purposes. Respondents (74%) permit mobile phones for basic classroom activities, but lack true integration with teaching and learning

A text message intervention for quitting cigarette smoking among young adults experiencing homelessness: study protocol for a pilot randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundCigarette smoking is much more prevalent among young people experiencing homelessness than in the general population of adolescents and young adults. Although many young homeless smokers are motivated to quit, there are no empirically-evaluated smoking cessation programs for this population. It is important that any such program address the factors known to be associated with quitting-related outcomes among homeless young people, to provide ongoing support in a way that accommodates the mobility of this population, and does not rely on scarce service provider resources for its delivery. The objective of this project is to develop and pilot test a text messaging-based intervention (TMI), as an adjunct to brief cessation counseling and provision of nicotine patches, to help homeless young people who want to quit smoking.Methods/designThis pilot study will utilize a cluster cross-over randomized controlled design with up to 80 current smokers who desire to quit and are recruited from three drop-in centers serving young people experiencing homelessness in the Los Angeles area. All participants will be provided with a minimum standard of care: a 30-min group-based smoking cessation counseling session and free nicotine replacement. Half of these smokers will then also receive the TMI, as an adjunct to this standard care, which will provide 6 weeks of ongoing support for quitting. This support includes continued and more intensive education regarding nicotine dependence, quitting smoking, and relapse; does not require additional agency resources; can be available "on demand" to users; and includes features to personalize the quitting experience. This study will investigate whether receiving the TMI adjunct to standard smoking cessation care results in greater reductions in cigarette smoking compared to standard care alone over a 3-month period.DiscussionThis study has the potential to address an important gap in the clinical research literature on cigarette smoking cessation and provide empirical support for using a TMI to provide ongoing assistance and support for quitting among young smokers experiencing homelessness. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT03874585. Registered March 14, 2019, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT03874585