Detection of Kidnapping Using a Smartphone Acceleration Sensor and GPS Module

Most of the previous studies on recognizing kidnapping situations dealt with video analysis based on cameras and location tracking using the Global Positioning System.However, video analysis has the disadvantage that it cannot obtain information from the camera's blind spots, and the Global Positioning System has the problem that it provides only fragmentary information about the user's location.This paper proposes a method for detecting kidnapping by vehicles, and the proposal overcomes the limitations of previous studies by employing comprehensive data from the 3-axis acceleration sensor and the Global Positioning System built into a smartphone.The proposed method analyzes the acceleration data obtained from smartphone users by two methods, which are called the Signal Magnitude Area and Signal Vector Magnitude, to classify smartphone users' states and analyze the location information to determine if the smartphone user is kidnapped by vehicles.The experiment used the data collected by ourselves to verify our hypothesis, and the experimental results showed that the proposed method can detect kidnapping by vehicles with high accuracy.Acceleration sensors and the Global Positioning System have the advantage that they are easy to miniaturize.Thus, the method proposed in this paper can be effectively deployed to detect kidnapping by vehicles.