Pedestrian navigation with foot-mounted inertial sensors in wearable body area networks

Recent advances in pedestrian navigation, a branch of wearable body area networks (WBAN), facilitate people's lives to help them get access to location-based services (LBS) at anywhere easily. This paper proposes a pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) algorithm to track the trajectory of the person using foot-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) and the estimation of the foot orientation with extended kalman filter (EKF). The proposed PDR algorithm involves several algorithms: gait phases detection algorithm, orientation estimation algorithm and EKF algorithm with zero velocity update technique (ZUPT). Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of estimating the trajectory accurately with low computational complexity and estimation error.