A real-time GPS scheme to assess safe driving skills

Avoiding road crashes has been the purpose behind many specialized software and hardware systems, involving both active and passive safety principles. Global Positioning technologies were incorporated into the transportation systems with the main purpose of acquiring the position of the vehicle under a continuous basis, for security and economy purposes. However, the GPS data can also be used for assessing the level of safety at which the vehicle is driven. On the basis of the essential data available from commercial GPS devices, in this paper we propose a combined performance measurement to assess the road safety level at which the vehicle is being driven. Such performance measure uses GPS data of the vehicle displacement, including the speed and the acceleration, as well as the course (latitude and longitude coordinates), in an integral driving assessment formulation that can run in real time. Results from the experimental use of this formulation suggest that the level of safety in the driving is time dependent, and that there are risky situations when different factors converge.