ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,258,036, issued on March 25.
"On-board detection and logging of driver smartphone use" was invented by Samuel J Petuchowski (Brookline, Mass.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A system for identifying manual use of a phone by the driver of a vehicle. The system has a smartphone with a memory programmed to collect heading, velocity and radial acceleration data already available to the operating system of all smartphones and uses the asymmetry with respect to right and left turns between a radial acceleration based on Earth-frame-based heading and speed data and a measured actual radial acceleration to detect manual phone usage by a driver. ...