Impact of Driving Behavior on Commuter's Comfort during Cab Rides: Towards a New Perspective of Driver Rating

Commuter comfort in cab rides affects driver rating as well as the reputation of ride-hailing firms like Uber/Lyft. Existing research has revealed that commuter comfort not only varies at a personalized level but also is perceived differently on different trips for the same commuter. Furthermore, there are several factors, including driving behavior and driving environment, affecting the perception of comfort. Automatically extracting the perceived comfort level of a commuter due to the impact of the driving behavior is crucial for a timely feedback to the drivers, which can help them to meet the commuter's satisfaction. In light of this, we surveyed around 200 commuters who usually take such cab rides and obtained a set of features that impact comfort during cab rides. Following this, we develop a system Ridergo which collects smartphone sensor data from a commuter, extracts the spatial time series feature from the data, and then computes the level of commuter comfort on a five-point scale with respect to the driving. Ridergo uses a Hierarchical Temporal Memory model-based approach to observe anomalies in the feature distribution and then trains a Multi-task learning-based neural network model to obtain the comfort level of the commuter at a personalized level. The model also intelligently queries the commuter to add new data points to the available dataset and, in turn, improve itself over periodic training. Evaluation of Ridergo on 30 participants shows that the system could provide efficient comfort score with high accuracy when the driving impacts the perceived comfort.