Assessment of road and driving quality via smartphones

Currently, road transportation has an important role in daily life. The importance of safety and comfort during transportation has increased and continue to increase as passengers' expectations about transportation changes via technological developments. Passengers not only want to reach their destinations in a short period of time than ever, but also they demand safer and comfortable transportation means. A high quality travel with these attributes is only achievable with high quality vehicles and road conditions and competent drivers. This thesis focuses on two factors other than vehicle quality. Road conditions and driving quality are the main area of interest.As another result of technological improvements, usage of smart phones spread over and several firms have brought hundreds of different smart phones on the market. These smart phones can be used not only as regular phones, but also with different aims due to their hardware features and to their ability to connect to the Internet. Smart phones continue to gain place in every aspect of daily life thanks to hundreds of new applications which are designed for smart phones.In this thesis, accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors which are embedded to Android Operating System based smart phones are used to perceive and differentiate some road problems and false driver behaviors.Due to the fact that smart phones were chosen as the ground for analysis, the implementation and maintenance costs were low and the mobility of the system was high. As a result of thesis, the system can be able to recognize and to classify road conditions and driver behaviors with 91% of success rate. The study has differentiated from earlier works owing to the fact that it does not require to fix mobile phone to the vehicle with a specific position or orientation.