BaroTrack: Low Cost Tracking of Commuter on Road

Majority of urban commuters prefer cabs due to easy accessibility. A big fraction of these cabs are managed by web-based cab operators, who provide the service to commuters through a mobile application. Sometimes, the drivers of these cabs swindle the customers by over-charging them for the journey. This happens when the cab drivers start the billing process before the commuter boards the cab and/or, when they end the billing process much later than when the commuter has deboarded the cab. Such cases can be prevented by detecting and recording the actual boarding and deboarding time of the commuter. Our proposed system handles such cases of fraud, by detecting the boarding and deboarding events of commuter in the cab. It suggests to do so by using the pressure values recorded by the barometer sensor of the smartphone of the commuter, and of a barometer device installed in the cab or using the barometer sensor of smartphone of the cab driver. The core of our mechanism is a comparison of the sequence of barometer values across two devices: the commuter's and the driver's. Since barometer sensor is passive and uses very low power, it makes overall system economical in terms of power consumption. Further the proposed system necessitates minimal amount of data to be sent to the server for processing. The proposed system is tested in varied environmental conditions and good average accuracy is observed in all the cases.