Comparing Heading Estimates from Multiple Wearable Inertial and Magnetic Sensors Mounted on Lower Limbs

This paper presents heading estimations from multiple low-cost wearable sensors distributed on the lower limb segments. A low-cost commercial motion capture suit from Enflux is used to record accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer measurements. Roll and pitch angles from each sensor are estimated to level each magnetometer. The sensor orientations are computed using a Kalman filter. The step length is computed using the sensor mounted on the pelvis while the stride length is computed using the foot-mounted sensors. The results show that the pelvis is the best location to track pedestrian heading while other sensors have poor performance due to difficulty in estimating the roll and pitch angles.