Week 4 Summary
Pedestrian Tracking with Shoe-Mounted Inertial Sensors
The paper describes NavShoe, a pedestrian navigation system which tracks the location of a person on foot. NavShoe provides real-time location data of individuals in GPS denied areas without the need of pre-existing infrastructure. The system makes use of an wireless inertial sensor which is small enough to fit into shoe laces and run on low power. NavShoe can be used to determine real-time tracking of soldiers, workers in hazardous environment, people engaged in rescue operations for ex. firefighters etc.
The highlight of the system is that it can be coupled with a RF or GPS in order to provide accurate thee-dimensional position and location co-ordinates. It is independent of the stride length and pace at which the person walks. The indoor and outdoor experiments both showed high accuracy. Even though the NavShoe system is fairly small it is highly sophisticated since it contains both hardware and software components to it.
Hardware consists of a nine-element multisensor containing gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers. The radio supports 16 RF channels, The software is responsible to track initial position and correct heading direction with a magnetic compass.
The fact that now it is wireless and does not require any calibration makes the functionality even more commendable. I would like to ask the author is whether the tests were conducted in any kind of a controlled environment to test the accuracy of the system. Cause if they were not then I feel that the NavShoe and similar technology systems might be ready to be used in a wide field of applications like Military, Surveillance, BioMechanics even Sports to a great extent.
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