Context-aware smart car: from model to prototype

Smart cars are promising application domain for ubiquitous computing. Context-awareness is the key feature of a smart car for safer and easier driving. Despite many industrial innovations and academic progresses have been made, we find a lack of fully context-aware smart cars. This study presents a general architecture of smart cars from the viewpoint of context-awareness. A hierarchical context model is proposed for description of the complex driving environment. A smart car prototype including software platform and hardware infrastructures is built to provide the running environment for the context model and applications. Two performance metrics were evaluated: accuracy of the context situation recognition and efficiency of the smart car. The whole response time of context situation recognition is nearly 1.4 s for one person, which is acceptable for non-time critical applications in a smart car.