POFS: A novel pedestrian-oriented forewarning system for vulnerable pedestrian safety

As the popularity of the smartphone is increasing, the number of people getting involved in accidents with vehicles while using their smartphones is also increasing. Pedestrians divert their attention from walking because of the attraction of smartphone, which causes the accidents. It is critical to design a pedestrian-oriented system to alert the pedestrian smartphone users to imminent dangers while they are immersed in their smartphones. In this paper, a novel Pedestrian-Oriented Forewarning System (POFS) is proposed to protect the distracted vulnerable pedestrians. POFS divides the states of smartphone into four kinds: screen-centric state, voice-centric state, screen-voice state and silent state, and provides the adaptive alert mode on the basis of specific state. An on board unit (OBU) which can achieve IEEE 802.11p and the traditional Wi-Fi protocols is proposed to support the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication at the same time. An efficient collision estimation algorithm is proposed to provide reliable alert for pedestrian. Experimental studies show that POFS can alert the pedestrian using the efficient alert.