Use of an Inertial/Magnetic Sensor Module for Pedestrian Tracking During Normal Walking

Abstract

The ability to track pedestrians without any infrastructure support is required by numerous applications in the healthcare, augmented reality, and entertainment industries. In this paper, we present a simple self-contained pedestrian tracking method using a foot-mounted inertial and magnetic sensor module. Traditional methods normally incorporate double integration of the measured acceleration, but such methods are susceptible to the acceleration noise and integration drift. To avoid this issue, alternative approaches which make use of walking dynamics to aggregate individual stride have been explored. The key for stride aggregating is to accurately and reliably detect stride boundary and estimate the associated heading direction for each stride, but it is still not well solved yet due to sensor noise and external disturbance. In this paper, we propose to make use of the inertial sensor and magnetometer measurements for stride detection and heading direction determination. In our method, a simple and reliable stride detection method, which is resilient to random bouncing motions and sensor noise, is designed based on gyroscope and accelerometer measurements. Heading direction is then determined from the foot's orientation which fuses all the three types of sensor information together. The proposed pedestrian tracking method has been evaluated using experiments, including both short distance walking with different patterns and long distance walking performed indoors and outdoors. The good experimental results have illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed pedestrian tracking method.