Smartphone-based pedestrian dead reckoning and orientation as an indoor positioning system

Indoor positioning system (IPS) is becoming more and more important and necessary in our daily life. Based on the IPS, we may develop a variety of location based services (LBS) such as navigation and orientation in large commercial centers, tracking and monitoring objects, or locating the elderly and children. With the development of new advanced technologies, the hand-held devices such as smart-phones and tablets have been widely used. These devices are all equipped with common sensors such as accelerometer, magnetic field, gyro and sound sensors. Therefore, the development of sensors-based positioning system is becoming practical and easy to implement while GPS or Cell-ID works inaccurately in the indoor environment. In this paper, we propose a solution and develop an application to position user's location in an indoor environment by pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and orientation. The proposed system just uses some available sensors of smart-phones: accelerometer sensor, gyro sensor and gravity sensor for PDR which detects steps as well as to measure the length and the orientation of his/her steps and then computes his/her location.