WalkSafe: A Pedestrian Safety App for Mobile Phone Users Who Walk and Talk While Crossing Roads

Research in social science has shown that mobile phone conversations distract users, presenting a significant impact to pedestrian safety; for example, a mobile phone user deep in conversation while crossing a street is generally more at risk than other pedestrians not engaged in such behavior. We propose WalkSafe, an Android smartphone application that aids people that walk and talk, improving the safety of pedestrian mobile phone users. WalkSafe uses the back camera of the mobile phone to detect vehicles approaching the user, alerting the user of a potentially unsafe situation; more specifically WalkSafe i) uses machine learning algorithms implemented on the phone to detect the front views and back views of moving vehicles and ii) exploits phone APIs to save energy by running the vehicle detection algorithm only during active calls. We present our initial design, implementation and evaluation of the WalkSafe App that is capable of real-time detection of the front and back views of cars, indicating cars are approaching or moving away from the user, respectively. WalkSafe is implemented on Android phones and alerts the user of unsafe conditions using sound and vibration from the phone. WalkSafe is available on Android Market.