An Indoor Positioning Method using Smartphone and Smartwatch Independent of Carrying Modes

A pedestrian dead reckoning method, or PDR method in short, is one of the positioning methods in indoor environments, which estimates user's positions by using sensors such as acceleration and angular velocity sensors. When we consider using a smartphone as a PDR sensor device, it has various carrying modes such as holding it directly and carrying it inside a pocket. How to deal with these various carrying modes is the great concern in PDR using a smartphone. In this paper, we propose a PDR method based on a combination of a smartphone and a smartwatch. By synchronizing smartphone and smartwatch sensors effectively, the proposed method can successfully reduce drift errors and thus estimate accurate user's positions, compared to just using a smartphone. Furthermore, even when the user carries his/her smartphone in various carrying modes, the proposed method still realizes accurate PDR. The experimental results demonstrate that the positioning errors are reduced by approximately 87.5% on average compared to the existing method.