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

This paper describes WalkCompass, a system that 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. Moreover, the walking direction is in the phone's local coordinate system (e.g., along Y axis), and translation to global directions, such as 45 degree North, can be challenging when the compass is itself erroneous. WalkCompass copes with these challenges and develops a stable technique to estimate the user's walking direction within a few steps. Results drawn from 15 different environments demonstrate median error of less than 8 degrees, across 6 different users, 3 surfaces, and 3 holding positions. While there is room for improvement, we believe our current system can be immediately useful to various applications centered around localization and human activity recognition.