Smartphone enabled connected vehicles pave the way to intelligent mobility

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Smartphones could replace dedicated hardware for the deployment of on-board units in vehicles? Today smartphones and Electronic Control Units (ECU’s) have comparable processing power, and smartphone’s users are steadily increasing in number, making this kind of device a prime choice for any vehicular application. The real difference between them is the amount of data coming from the vehicle’s ECU’s which is available to the latter one. However, some information can be also collected by the smartphone, simply interfacing it to the diagnostic connector named OBD, available on all cars, via a Bluetooth adapter. In the future, possibly in the next few years, more data could be provided through vehicle’s Bluetooth, making this approach even more attractive. Another point in favour of this solution is the steady increase in processing and connectivity capabilities of smartphones, so that even old vehicles will be able to use state-of-the-art ITS applications. This can not be done with an ECU, which cannot be easily replaced or upgraded during the vehicle life. All this makes quite interesting to investigate the potential of what we named a “connected vehicle”, i.e. a vehicle where a smartphone is able to retrieve some data from the OBD-II diagnostic interface (or directly from the Bluetooth vehicle’s information system in a possible future scenario) and plays a key role in providing services to their users in many different Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) scenarios.