Assessing Cyclists' Stress on A Large-Scale: A Practical Smartphone-Based Data-Driven Approach

The primary motivation for this project is to improve street design and planning through a better understanding of cyclists’ perceived stress when they bike in city streets. The project team aims to create an “affective map”, called StressMap, by integrating cyclists’ stress levels in tempo-spatial domains. The team begins by narrowing the large field of potential stressors and measures of stress using traditional methods, such as instrumented bicycles and physiological sensors. However, such methods necessarily limit the scope of data that can be collected over time. Therefore, the project team's idea makes use of various onboard sensors of smartphones carried by cyclists to measure environmental and traffic surroundings over a larger area and time frame, enabling a large-scale stress assessment. The sensory data is then automatically collected and uploaded to the cloud server, where our deep learning model is deployed, to derive cyclists’ stress distribution over a large geographic area. This project consists of four components. First, the project team plans to measure environmental conditions when interacting with different types of infrastructure and traffic situations to quantify the perceived safety of cycling infrastructure. Using this data, the project team will identify critical environmental stressors. Second, the team will develop a smartphone app to measure those stressors, as informed by the first component, via onboard sensors. AI models will be constructed to map the sensory readings to cyclists’ stress. Third, the team will conduct a controlled-environment bike simulator study to produce a labeled dataset essential for the AI model training and validate the assessment accuracy of the proposed AI model. Finally, the team will use crowdsourcing to generate the StressMap that characterizes stressful road environments and traffic encounters for bicyclists. The derived tempo-spatial distribution of cyclists’ stress will be visualized and made publicly accessible for the stakeholders.

    Language

    • English

    Project

    • Status: Active
    • Funding: $100000
    • Contract Numbers:

      022-03

    • Sponsor Organizations:

      Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions, & Dollars

      University of Texas at Arlington
      Arlington, TX  United States  76019

      University of Texas at Arlington

      Box 19308
      Arlington, TX  United States  76019-0308

      Department of Transportation

      Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
      1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
      Washington, DC  United States  20590
    • Managing Organizations:

      Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions, & Dollars

      University of Texas at Arlington
      Arlington, TX  United States  76019

      University of Texas at Arlington

      Box 19308
      Arlington, TX  United States  76019-0308
    • Performing Organizations:

      University of Texas at Arlington

      Box 19308
      Arlington, TX  United States  76019-0308

      Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta

      790 Atlantic Drive
      Atlanta, GA  United States  30332-0355
    • Principal Investigators:

      Li, Ming

      Deb, Shuchisnigdha

      LeDantec, Chris

    • Start Date: 20220601
    • Expected Completion Date: 20230531
    • Actual Completion Date: 0
    • USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

    Subject/Index Terms

    Filing Info

    • Accession Number: 01854735
    • Record Type: Research project
    • Source Agency: Center for Transportation, Equity, Decisions & Dollars (CTEDD)
    • Contract Numbers: 022-03
    • Files: UTC, RIP
    • Created Date: Aug 16 2022 6:12PM