Demo: I am a smartphone and I can tell my user's walking direction

Nirupam Roy, He Wang, Romit Roy Choudhury

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We present a demonstration of WalkCompass, a system to appear in the MobiSys 2014 main conference. WalkCompass exploits smartphone sensors to estimate the direction in which a user is walking. We find that several smartphone localization systems in the recent past, including our own, make a simplifying assumption that the user's walking direction is known. In trying to relax this assumption, we were not able to find a generic solution from past work. While intuition suggests that the walking direction should be detectable through the accelerometer, in reality this direction gets blended into various other motion patterns during the act of walking, including up and down bounce, side-to-side sway, swing of arms or legs, etc. WalkCompass analyzes the human walking dynamics to estimate the dominating forces and uses this knowledge to find the heading direction of the pedestrian. In the demonstration we will show the performance of this system when the user holds the smartphone on the palm. A collection of YouTube videos of the demo is posted at http://synrg.csl. illinois.edu/projects/ localization/walkcompass.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMobiSys 2014 - Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages354
Number of pages1
ISBN (Print)9781450327930
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2014 - Bretton Woods, NH, United States
Duration: Jun 16 2014Jun 19 2014

Publication series

NameMobiSys 2014 - Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Other

Other12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBretton Woods, NH
Period6/16/146/19/14

Keywords

  • activity recognition
  • compass correction
  • force analysis
  • heading direction
  • localization
  • magnetic field
  • mobile phones
  • orientation
  • sensing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Demo: I am a smartphone and I can tell my user's walking direction'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this