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

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.