7600
21, NOVEMBER 1, 2016
Personal Dead Reckoning Using IMU Mounted on
Upper Torso and Inverted Pendulum Model
Tri-Nhut Do, Ran Liu, Chau Yuen, Senior Member, IEEE, Meng Zhang, and U-Xuan Tan, Member, IEEE
Abstract— There has been an increasing demand for
infrastructureless localization. Current approaches involving
inertial measurement unit (IMU) generally utilize step detection
and step counting to estimate the displacement. However, the
accuracy is affected, because the step sizes are neglected. Some
groups have proposed algorithms that involve placing the IMU on
the foot to estimate the step size, but users have commented that
it affects their walking. Hence, this paper presents a new method
to estimate both the forward displacement and orientation with
the IMU placed at the upper torso. Placing IMU at the upper
torso to estimate horizontal displacement has been challenging,
as the accuracy of the inertial sensors is greatly handicapped
by the notorious integration drift when performing integration
in the travel direction with the lack of opportunity for zero
velocity update. Thus, a novel method is proposed in this paper by
exploiting the vertical component of the accelerometer reading.
An inverted pendulum model is proposed with a step detector
and a step length estimation method. The system is implemented,
and two sets of experiments are conducted to demonstrate
the capability. The experiment sets include straight lines and
rectangular shape path, and in each set, four step sizes of small,
normal, large, and mixture are conducted for each test and each
test is performed four times. The experimental results show
an average displacement error of 1% for straight line paths
and 2% for the rectangular paths.
Index Terms— Dead reckoning, inertial navigation, step length
estimation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I NDOOR localization demand has been increasing for rea-
sons ranging from public safety to elderly care, safety of
firemen to operational planning or strategy coordination of
soldiers. Current localization systems can be broadly classi-
fied into two categories, namely: 1) infrastructure-based, and
2) infrastructureless. Infrastructure-based localization systems
include utilizing Global Positioning System (GPS) [1], [2],
and wireless communication like wireless local area
network [3]–[5] and radio frequency [6]. However, infra-
structure-based systems are not suitable for a number of
situations due to a couple reasons like requirement for prior
hardware installation in the building, higher infrastructure cost,
calibration and training.
Manuscript received May 25, 2016; revised August 1, 2016; accepted
August 5, 2016. Date of publication August 24, 2016; date of current version
September 28, 2016. This work was supported by SUTD Temasek Laborato-
ries. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it
for publication was Dr. E. H. Yang. (Corresponding author: U-Xuan Tan.)
T.-N. Do, R. Liu, C. Yuen, and U-X. Tan are with the Pillar of Engineering
Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design,
Singapore 487372 (e-mail: trinhut_do@sutd.edu.sg; ran_liu@sutd.edu.sg;
yuenchau@sutd.edu.sg; uxuan_tan@sutd.edu.sg).
M. Zhang is with the College of Electronic Science and Engineering,
Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: zmeng@seu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2016.2601937
1558-1748 © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO.
The second category of solutions consists of infrastruc-
tureless indoor localization systems, and inertial navigation
systems used to estimate pedestrian’s displacement. There
are two types of pedestrian dead-reckoning using inertial
navgiation systems, which are: a) strapdown and b) step-and-
heading [7]. The strapdown algorithm method utilizes IMU
and estimates pedestrians’ position by double integration of
the three orthogonal accelerometer readings. The accuracy
of inertial sensors is greatly handicapped by the notorious
integration drift, though [8]. To address this, researchers have
been utilizing zero velocity updates. Schepers et al. [9] have
utilized the fact that the velocity of the foot is zero when it is
on the ground to remove the drift effect in their Kalman filter.
Thus, the integrated velocity from accelerometer reading is
set to be zero during the zero velocity intervals. To further
improve the position accuracy, Do and Suh [10] utilize zero
velocity update plus information extracted from camera image
processing.
The step-and-heading approach on the other hand first
identifies steps or strides, followed by computation of the
step length by employing the appropriate model, and finally
estimates heading by utilizing any devices good for orientation
estimation such as IMUs and cameras [11]. In this approach,
the orientation and heading is mostly estimated using quater-
nion [12] and Kalman filter, either in direct form [13], [14] or
indirect form [15], [16]. Alternatively, the heading is corrected
using other sensors like camera [17].
Pan and Lin [18] proposed step counting using a smart
phone. Constant step length is usually used to approximate
the displacement. Zhang et al. [19] and Renaudin [20] further
improve the accuracy by classifying pedestrian’s motion into
six motion modes with an adaptive algorithm to detect step
events. Diaz [7] and Diaz and Gonzalez [21] on the other hand,
proposes using on empirical modeling of walking and utilize
the information of the opening angle of the leg to estimate
displacement. The models used involve parameters that are
personalized for each individual and hence, prior training and
learning have to be conducted to obtain a good estimate of
these parameters.
In order to avoid the requirement of training, the authors’
previous work [16] utilizes a walking model to estimate both
the step length and step size. However, users have commented
that placing the IMU at their foot or ankle affects their
walking. In addition, it is more practical [22] to place the IMU
at the upper torso for monitoring daily life activities, especially
in walking. In a natural manner, people using devices like
cell phone with built-in IMU prefer to put their devices in
DO et al.: PERSONAL DEAD RECKONING USING IMU
Fig. 1. IMU is placed on the upper torso for greater convenience and used
to locate the pedestrian.
upper torso such as in a T-shirt pocket (chest area), belt bag
(waist and back area). This placement is to feel more free
when walking.
Hence, this paper proposes a method to estimate both the
forward displacement and orientation with the IMU placed at
the upper torso as shown in Fig. 1.
Placing the IMU at the upper torso to estimate horizontal
displacement without prior training or using other sensors
to perform sensor fusion has been a challenging task as
it is not possible to obtain the displacement via double
integration of the horizontal acceleration. Putting the IMU
at the waist has been proposed by Alvarez et al. [23] and
Inderst and Santoni [24]. The algorithm in [24] utilizes
the empirical model involving the maximum and mini-
mum vertical acceleration and calibration/training is required.
On the other hand, the algorithm in [23] exploited the
vertical acceleration and an inverted pendulum model.
Alvarez et al. [23] estimated the displacement based on zero
velocity intervals from initial contact (IC) to final contact (FC).
One limitation of this method is that a large amount of
data was discarded due to failure of zero velocity detection.
As there is a lack of opportunity for zero velocity or displace-
ment update along the travel direction, this paper proposes
a method in order to be independent of the zero velocity
intervals. By taking the advantage of the cyclic nature of
gait as in [25], an inverted pendulum model is proposed.
The system is implemented in real-time and experiments
are conducted to demonstrate the capability which includes
various upper torso location and various walking step sizes.
An overview of the proposed system for configuration
and 3D attitude estimation is illustrated in section II. This
is followed by section III which describes the estimation
method which consists of walking model, step detection and
how the vertical acceleration is used to estimate horizontal
displacement. A range of experiments are performed and
the details are illustrated in section IV. Section V concludes
the paper.
II. S YSTEM OVERVIEW
Fig. 2 provides an overview of the proposed system, where
the inputs yg , ya , and ym are reading data in three dimensions
of gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer respectively,
and φ̂, θ̂ and ψ̂ are the three estimated Euler angles roll,
pitch and yaw respectively. The system consists of two main
functions: 1) 3D attitude estimation, and 2) displacement
estimation using vertical acceleration and walking model.
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Fig. 2. Overview of the proposed methodology.
The recorded data from gyroscope is then passed through
a high-pass filter with 0.3Hz cut-off frequency in order to
remove the DC offset drift so that it is more stable for
operation over a long period of time.
A. Coordinate System Assignment
Before any computation and estimation, all the coordinates
systems must be assigned and are assigned as illustrated
in Fig. 1. In this paper, the IMU is placed at the upper torso
of the pedestrian. The subscript notations of W and B indicate
World and sensor’s body frame respectively. The East-North-
Up (ENU) coordinate system is used as the world reference
frame (X W YW Z W ).
B. Attitude Estimation
A quaternion-based Kalman Filter in indirect form [15]
with advantages described in Appendix is employed in
order to estimate the IMU attitude which included the user
heading (ψ̂), IMU pitch and roll angles (θ̂ and φ̂) by fusing
the information from the gyroscope, the accelerometer and the
magnetometer. The employed attitude estimation algorithm has
two advantages as follows: 1) reducing computation cost due
to dealing with orientation errors instead of dealing direct with
orientation which results the state dimension being smaller and
its response faster, and 2) two stages update using acceleration
and magnetic strength by exploiting two measurements of
the difference between accelerometer reading vs the gravity
vector and the difference between magnetometer reading vs
the magnetic strength vector.
C. Body to World Rotation
As illustrated in Fig. 2, the acceleration along the vertical
axis in the world frame, azw , is the input to the displacement
estimation function. In order to obtain it, the acceleration
reading is rotated to the world frame and hence, the vertical
acceleration, azw , is obtained via:
⎛ ⎞ ⎛ ⎞
• 0
⎝ • ⎠ = C(q)T ya − ⎝ 0 ⎠ (1)
az w g
Unlike most methods whereby horizontal acceleration is
used to estimate the horizontal displacement, this vertical
acceleration information, azw , is used to estimate the horizontal
displacement and the detailed methodology is described in the
following section.
III. E STIMATING D ISPLACEMENT U SING
V ERTICAL ACCELERATION
This section describes the details about the proposed method
of displacement estimation using the vertical acceleration with
7602 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 21, NOVEMBER 1, 2016

Fig. 3. Block diagram of the proposed displacement estimation using vertical

acceleration.

walking model as mentioned in Fig. 2. This proposed method

employs vertical component of the acceleration in the global
frame, azw . Fig. 3 shows the block diagram of the displacement
estimation methodology. azw is the input to the proposed
estimation method and is passed through a high-pass filter with
0.3 Hz cut-off frequency to remove the slow drifting effect due
to factors like temperature before performing integration.
The filtered vertical acceleration is then used to obtain the
vertical displacement during upward motion and downward
motion. This information is then passed through the walking
model to estimate the horizontal displacement.

A. Walking Model
Fig. 4. The walking motion of the torso (e.g.: hip) can be modeled as an
Generally, bipedal walking is a simplified version of human inverted pendulum, and the zoom-in version of the hip motion illustrates the
walking motion [25] and can be used to study walking motion. relationship between vertical and horizontal displacement.
When the motion of the foot is deeply analyzed, the leg motion
can be modeled as a simple pendulum. On the contrary, when
analyzing the hip motion, the walking model is an inverted
pendulum. In other words, the pendulum model is used when
the hip is used as the pivot point, and inverted pendulum model
is used when the foot is used as the pivot point.
By using the simple pendulum model, the authors estimated
displacement using only one IMU located at one of the
ankles [16]. A localization algorithm is proposed with no prior
training required and the leg length can be estimated via the
algorithm.
Our clients have commented that it is more convenient and
user-friendly to place the IMU on the torso. Moreover, the pro-
posed algorithm can potentially be developed in smartphone
apps, where the smartphone IMU will be used and hence it
is better to put it on the torso than foot. Therefore, this paper
investigates new locations of IMU at the waist, back and chest
with an assumption of pedestrians’ torso to be kept upright
when walking. Since the IMU is on the torso, and based on Fig. 5. This figures illustrates four cycles of a typical profile of the vertical
acceleration, velocity, and displacement r1 and r2 of Fig. 4.
the fact that the motion of upper torso in pedestrians’ walking
is a cyclic nature gait, an inverted pendulum is used. Fig. 4
blue ring, respectively. Fig. 5 shows four cycles of the a typical
illustrates the motion of the torso and how inverted pendulum
profile of the vertical acceleration, velocity, and displacement
can be used. Integrating the horizontal acceleration directly
r1 and r2 of model shown in Fig. 4.
is not feasible because there is no opportunity to perform any
zero update. Hence, an algorithm utilizing vertical acceleration
to estimate horizontal displacement is proposed. B. Step Detector
Fig. 4 shows an inverted pendulum model that resembles Using the walking model as a guide, a step detector algo-
the motion of pedestrians hip. The pedestrians’ leg length rithm is used based on the peak positions of vertical accelera-
is the arm of inverted pendulum. The small dense dots repre- tion azw . Based on the walking model, the movement of the hip
sent the ideal trajectory of the hip in the horizontal direction in the vertical gravity direction is periodic and can be modeled
when a pedestrian walks. In one period, the hip generally using a sinusoidal function. The hip reaches the top position
starts from the lowest point, reaches to one highest point and (the highest point) at the lowest peak of vertical acceleration
falls to one lowest point as illustrated by the red ring and the whereas it reaches the bottom position (the lowest point) at
DO et al.: PERSONAL DEAD RECKONING USING IMU
Fig. 6. The blue solid line represents the vertical acceleration during a
walk, step events are identified to assist in the estimation of the horizontal
displacement using vertical acceleration.
the highest peak of the vertical acceleration during walking.
Hence, each step is identified from a highest point to the next
adjacent highest point and the maximum peaks of vertical
acceleration are consequently related with the occurrence of
the steps.
To identify the peaks, the current vertical acceleration value
is compared with both the previous adjacent value and the
next adjacent one. A vertical acceleration value is defined as a
maximum extreme peak if and only if it is larger than the
previous one but smaller than the next one. Similarly, the
Peaklow
vertical acceleration value is defined as a minimum extreme
peak if and only if it is smaller than the previous one but
Peakhigh
larger than the next one. Threshold value is also being applied
to avoid erroneous peak detection due to noise. In addition, a
wait function is implemented to avoid detecting double peaks.
This can be summarized in the following equation:
⎧ flying vertical upwards, this information is utilized to perform
⎪
⎪ azw,min = azw,k ⇐⇒ azw,k−1 > azw,k + C
⎪
⎨ the function of zero displacement update as illustrated in Fig. 5
& azw,k < azw,k+1 − C
(2)
⎪
⎪ a = azw,k ⇐⇒ azw,k−1 < azw,k − C
⎪
⎩
z w,max
& azw,k > azw,k+1 + C
where k stands for the current instant and C is the threshold.
Upon detecting a turning point, a delay of 250 ms for the next
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section aims at explaining the proposed horizontal displace-
ment estimation algorithm using vertical acceleration, which
is based on the double integration of the vertical acceleration
followed by using the inverted pendulum model (as shown
in Fig. 4).
In order to estimate the vertical displacement with the infor-
mation of the vertical acceleration azw , the vertical velocity,
v zw is first obtained by integrating azw . As illustrated in Fig. 3,
this velocity information is passed through a high-pass filter
to reduce the accumulation of errors due to integration. The
second integration is then applied to the integrated vertical
velocity to obtain the vertical displacement.
To reduce accumulated integration error, the overall inte-
gration progress is also divided into segments, and each step
consists of two segments. The first segment starts from the
highest peak to the lowest peak, and the second segment is
from the lowest peak to the next adjacent highest peak as
illustrated in Fig. 4. The displacement for each segment is used
to estimate the horizontal displacement and is not accumulated
between segments. The purpose is to avoid accumulating the
error in the velocity domain that is used during integration as
the effect will be greater.
Hence, the vertical displacement r j1 and r j2 can be
obtained as:
r j1 = v zw dt (3)
Peakhigh
r j2 = v zw dt (4)
Peaklow
where j represents the step number.
Since the pedestrian is walking on a floor and cannot be
and Fig. 7. The horizontal displacement is next computed
using the vertical displacement and employing the inverted
pendulum. This can be solved using the Pythagorean theorem
as follows:
d j = d1, j + d2, j (5)
turning point detection is also implemented based on normal 
2 
2
walking speed. This is because the gradient of the signal to = L 2 − L − |r j1 | + L 2 − L − |r j2 | (6)
noise ratio is generally weaker around the turning point. where d j represents the horizontal displacement for step
To illustrate the feasibility of the step detector algorithm, an number j .
experiment of walking with a normal step size along with a The experimental data recorded in previous subsection is
40 meters straight line is conducted. Fig. 6 shows the vertical also used for illustrating the proposed algorithm of vertical
acceleration azw . The vertical acceleration azw is depicted with displacement estimation. The integrated results are shown
the solid blue line whereas the red rings represent the top peaks in Fig. 7. The first plot shows the vertical acceleration whereas
of the vertical acceleration and the blue rings represent the the second plot and the third plot illustrate the integrated
lowest peaks of it. All of the tops peaks (red rings) in Fig. 6 vertical velocity and the integrated vertical displacement,
are the detected steps (or step events). As seen in Fig. 6, the respectively.
steps are 100% accurately detected. Finally, the displacement of the pedestrian is computed
based on the previous position for each detected step, the step
C. Estimation of Horizontal Displacement length and the heading. Hence, the position of the pedestrian
can be computed as follows:
Displacement is often estimated by double integration of ⎧  
the acceleration in that same direction and followed by some ⎨ X j = X j −1 + d j cos ψ̂ − 0.23°
form of compensation like zero velocity or vision to address   (7)
⎩Y j = Y j −1 + d j sin ψ̂ − 0.23°
the drift. In order to achieve a pure IMU sensing system, this
7604
Fig. 7. The solid blue line depicts the vertical acceleration and velocity within
a part of whole result whereas the cyan dotted line is the integrated vertical
displacement. The integrated values are reset to zero at the red rings whereas
the blue rings represent their previous adjacent values which are taken for the
computation of the horizontal displacement.
where X j and Y j represent the position in the East- and
North-axis at step count j , and 0.23° is used due to magnetic
declination at Changi, Singapore (location of experiment), and
the angle ψ̂ is above mentioned heading.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
The mentioned proposed method is implemented as illus-
trated in Fig. 8, and experiments are conducted to illustrate
the capability of the proposed method. In this section, a brief
description of the experiment setup is first given, followed
by a description of the experiments conducted and the results
obtained.
A. Experimental Setup
The proposed algorithm has been tested and the hard-
ware used in the IMU localization system is illustrated in
Fig. 9, with the top portion indicating the mobile components
(attached to the pedestrian) and the bottom indicating the base
components. The mobile part consists of an Xbee wireless
transmitter, an MPU-9150 IMU sensor board and an Arduino
Fio microcontroller Atmega328P board whereas the base part
has the laptop and an Xbee wireless receiver. The transmitter
communicates with Fio board using serial protocol. The Fio
board collects data from IMU board using I2 C communication
protocol. The receiver is connected to PC or the Laptop via
serial port. Then, the received data is processed for observation
and visualization. The proposed algorithm is implemented
in the mobile part with the data acquired in every 25 ms
and passed through a complimentary filter with 225 ms time
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 21, NOVEMBER 1, 2016
Fig. 8. Block diagram of the experiment setup, with the mobile components
(attached to pedestrian) indicated at the top and the base components indicated
at the bottom.
Fig. 9. Experiment setup with (a) illustrating the size and (b) demonstrating
one of the locations tested.
constant. In addition, the ground truth is measured using Fluke
411D Laser Distance Meter.
B. Experiments and Results
For all the experiments, the mobile part is mounted on
the torso. Two experimental sets of scenarios are conducted,
namely: 1) walking along a straight line with three pre-defined
travelling distances for displacement accuracy evaluation, and
2) walking along with a rectangular path with a fixed travelling
distance for combination of heading and displacement accu-
racy evaluation. Four subjects in our research group aging from
25 to 39 with height ranging from 1.6 meters to 1.86 meters
are recruited for these experiments, and all the experiments
conducted are repeated with varying step sizes of small,
normal, large and then a mixture of them. Each test is also
repeated for four times.
1) Walking Along a Straight Line: In this experimental
scenario, four volunteers are tasked with walking at normal
speed. The test is repeated with several distances of the straight
line covering 20 meters, 40 meters and 60 meters. Each
distance is performed with three locations of IMU on upper
parts of human body and the locations are: 1) right waist,
2) end of back bone, and 3) center chest.
The results of positions are summarized in Table I. The
values shown in Table I are averaged estimation from all four
subjects and repeated tests.
The results in Table I suggest that even though the IMU
sensor board is put at a few positions like right waist, back and
chest, the proposed method is still able to estimate the distance
with an overall averaged error of 1%. Different parts of the
torso have different vertical displacements, and the reason why
DO et al.: PERSONAL DEAD RECKONING USING IMU
TABLE I
P ERFORMANCE OF THE P ROPOSED M ETHOD B ETWEEN I NITIAL AND E ND
P OSITION OF A S UBJECT WALKING A LONG A S TRAIGHT L INE
TABLE II
P ERFORMANCE OF THE P ROPOSED M ETHOD B ETWEEN I NITIAL AND E ND
P OSITION OF A S UBJECT WALKING A LONG A R ECTANGULAR PATH
the proposed methodology still works is because each part at
half of the instants are lower and the remaining instants are
higher. Thus, the net effect is approximately canceled out.
Fig. 10 illustrates one particular case among the various tests
conducted. In this test, the subject is walking with a mixture
of step sizes and the IMU board is mounted at the pedestrian’s
lower back and covering a 40 meters straight path.
The first plot illustrates the vertical acceleration whereas the
second plot depicts the integrated vertical displacement and the
third plotting shows the estimated positions in the navigation
frame.
2) Walking Along a Rectangular Path: In the second experi-
mental scenario, the same settings of walking speed, step sizes
and locations of IMU are kept for the four subjects to walk
along a rectangular path of 10 m by 8 m. Note that the four
right corners of the rectangle are replaced by four quartered-
circle corners which each has a 1 meter radius due to the
pathway available. The ground truth path is 34.3 m. All the
subjects are tasked to place the IMU at the back, and each
subject is tasked to perform four types of step sizes of small,
normal, large, and mixture. Each test is again conducted for
four times. Table II summarizes the results.
A set of experimental results for small step size (65 steps),
normal step size (50 steps), large step size (41 steps) and
mixture step size is illustrated in Fig. 11. As illustrated
in Fig. 11, the proposed algorithm is able to estimate the
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Fig. 10. Experimental result when subject is walking along a straight path:
The first plot illustrates the vertical acceleration whereas the second plot
depicts the integrated vertical displacement. The third plot shows the estimated
positions in world frame. In the third plot, the red asterisks ‘*’ represent the
estimated positions in walking whereas the black bold dashed line is the
ground truth. The subject starts walking at the black ‘x’ position and ended
at the blue ‘o’ position. (a) Vertical acceleration. (b) Vertical displacement.
(c) Localization of the pedestrian.
positions well with various sizes of steps, thus verifying the
feasibility of the proposed method for indoor localization
purposes. In order to verify the stabilization of the proposed
algorithm, all the four subjects are tasked to walk freely along
the mentioned rectangular testing path for four rounds. The
ground truth for this experiment is 137.1 m and one of the
experimental results is shown in Fig. 12. As seen in Fig. 12,
the proposed algorithm is repeatable and stable.
Moreover, the proposed algorithm is verified by longer dis-
tance experiments in both environments of indoor and outdoor.
The experiments were done in the Lab with a rectangular path
of 23 m by 12 m, which is circled by a 1 m radius ring
at 4 corners and around the standard 400 m track in the
7606
Fig. 11. In this figure, the red * represent the estimated positions when
walking with (a) small step size, (b) normal step size, (c) large step size, and
(d) mixture step size for a rectangular path.
Fig. 12. In this figure, the red * represent the estimated positions when
walking along the rectangular path for four rounds.
stadium. A pedestrian is tasked with walking freely at normal
speed (0.8 m/s) and normal step size covering 18 rounds in
the Lab and 1 round around the stadium. The experiment is
repeated 6 times. Fig. 13 shows one set of the results for
walking around the stadium with the error of 5.7 m (1.4%)
while Fig. 14 shows one set of the results for walking in the
Lab with the error of 3.02 m (0.25%).
V. C ONCLUSION & F UTURE W ORK
This paper has proposed new locations of IMU mounted
on human body, giving pedestrians more convenience and
comfort in wearing assistive mobile devices for daily activities.
To achieve this, a novel method in estimating horizontal
displacement is proposed. The general idea of the proposed
method is to utilize information from vertical acceleration
to estimate the horizontal displacement. Vertical, rather than
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 21, NOVEMBER 1, 2016
Fig. 13. In this figure, the red * represent the estimated positions when
walking along the 1st lane of a standard Olympic stadium.
Fig. 14. This figure shows the experimental result when walking around
rectangular path for a total distance of 1229 m.
horizontal, acceleration information is used to enable the pos-
sibility of zero displacement updates. A range of experiments
are conducted by four subjects and those can be grouped into
two sets. The two sets of experiment include straight lines,
and rectangular shape path. In each set, four step sizes of
small, normal, large and a mixture are conducted and each
test is repeated for four times. The experimental results have
demonstrated the capability of the algorithm to account for
subjects walking with varying step sizes with an average
displacement error of 0.5% for straight line paths and 2% for
the rectangular paths. An experiment has also been conducted
in the laboratory with total distance of 1229 m. The experiment
has an error of 0.25% of the total distance walked as illustrated
in Fig. 13, which is similar to the results reported. The
proposed method has avoided using accumulated errors in the
acceleration and velocity domain for the integration, but there
is still an accumulated error in the displacement domain and
this is much slower. In addition, this paper focuses on walking,
and other activities will be incorporated in the future work.
A PPENDIX
K ALMAN F ILTERING IN I NDIRECT F ORM
Attitude (φ̂, θ̂ and ψ̂) describes the pedestrian torso ori-
entation in space with respect to the fixed earth axes. In this
paper, the attitude is first obtained by numerical integration of
the angular velocity measured by gyroscope. Quaternion-based
indirect Kalman filter (iKF) [15], [16] is next employed to
estimate the angular errors. The advantage of this method over
DO et al.: PERSONAL DEAD RECKONING USING IMU 7607

existing Kalman filter is that it relies more on gyroscope than In order to obtain the estimated Euler angles, the estimated
the magnetic field, which is more suitable for indoor applica- quaternion (inclusive of error), q̂, is first approximated by a
tions because the effect of interference from the magnetic field discrete equation whereby the third-order local linearization
is lesser. The state of iKF is defined as following equations: algorithm is used:
• State definition: 3 1 1
⎡ ⎤ q̂k+1 = (I4×4 + k T − ωk 22 T 2 − k k−1 T 2
qe yaw 4 6 24
x  ⎣ qe pitch ⎦ = qe ∈ R 3×1 (8) 1
− ωk 22 T 2 k T 3 )q̂k (17)
qeroll 48
where x is the state space, and [1 qe ] is a quaternion of where ωk is vector of angular rate without sensor noise and
angular errors. is different from yg . The k is generated from ωk based
• State equation (continuous form): on (10). After that, the quaternion representing the Euler
    angles is obtained by multiplying the estimated quaternion
ẋ = −K (yg ) x + −0.5v g (9) with the quaternion-based estimated angular error obtained
where v g is gyroscope measurement noise, and K (yg ) is from equation (11) as follows:
defined by qk+1 = q̂k+1 ⊗ qek+1 (18)
⎡ ⎤

0 −yg (3) yg (2)
where q is the quaternion representing the Euler angles.
K yg  ⎣ yg (3) 0 −yg (1) ⎦ (10)
−yg (2) yg (1) 0
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
and yg (1), yg (2), and yg (3) are the x-, y-, and z-
The authors would like to thank Dr. Yang Liangjing and
components of gyroscope measurements respectively.
Mr. Li Hsieh-Yu from Singapore University of Technology
• State equation (discrete form):
and Design for finding the time to conduct the experiments,
x k+1 = exp(AT )x k + wk (11) and Ms Jennifer Lauv from MIT for correcting the grammar.
where wk is a vector of discrete white process noise,
T is the sampling time, and exp(AT ) is computed by: R EFERENCES
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Tri-Nhut Do received the B.Eng. degree in electri-
cal electronics engineering and the M.Eng. degree
in technology cybernetics engineering from the
Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology,
Vietnam, in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and the
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Uni-
versity of Ulsan, South Korea, in 2012. From 2013 to
2014, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Secu-
rity Laboratory, Multimedia University, Malaysia.
Since 2015, he has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow
with the Singapore University of Technology and
Design, Singapore. His research interest includes indoor localization, human
daily activities tracking, robotics, sensor fusion, and human emotion recog-
nition for security. He is a recipient of the Outstanding Paper Award from
ICCAS-SICE 2009.
Ran Liu received the bachelor’s degree from the
Southwest University of Science and Technology,
Mianyang, China, in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree
under the supervision of Prof. Dr. A. Zell and
Prof. Dr. A. Schilling from the University of
Tuebingen, Germany, in 2014. Since 2014, he has
been a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow under the
supervision of Prof. C. Yuen with the MIT Interna-
tional Design Center, Singapore University of Tech-
nology and Design. His research interests include
robotics, indoor positioning, UHF RFID localization,
and mapping.
IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 16, NO. 21, NOVEMBER 1, 2016
Chau Yuen (S’02–M’08–SM’12) received the
B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Nanyang Techno-
logical University, Singapore, in 2000 and 2004,
respectively. In 2005, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow
with Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, Murray Hill,
NJ, USA. In 2008, he was a Visiting Assistant
Professor with Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Hong Kong. From 2006 to 2010, he was a Senior
Research Engineer with the Institute for Infocomm
Research, Singapore, where he was involved in an
industrial project developing an 802.11n wireless
local area network system and actively participated in the third generation
Partnership Project Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-A standardization.
In 2010, he joined the Singapore University of Technology and Design,
Singapore, as an Assistant Professor. He has authored over 300 research
papers in international journals or conferences. He holds two U.S. patents.
He received the IEEE Asia-Pacific Outstanding Young Researcher Award in
2012. He serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON
V EHICULAR T ECHNOLOGY and was awarded as the Top Associate Editor
from 2009 to 2015.
Meng Zhang was born in China in 1964.
He received the B.S. degree in electrical engi-
neering from the China University of Mining and
Technology in 1986, and the M.S. degree in bio-
electronics engineering from Southeast University,
Nanjing, China, in 1993, and the Ph.D. degree
in microelectronics engineering. He is currently a
Professor with the National Application Specific
Integrated Circuit System Engineering Technology
Research Center, College of Electronic Science and
Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
He is also a Faculty Adviser of Ph.D. graduates. His research interests include
digital signal and image processing, digital communication systems, wireless
sensor networks, information security and assurance, cryptography, and digital
integrated circuit design, machine learning, system, and network optimiza-
tion. He has authored or co-authored over 50 referred journal and interna-
tional conference papers. He holds over 60 patents, including some PCT,
U.S. patents.
U-Xuan Tan (S’07–M’10) received the B.Eng. and
Ph.D. degrees from Nanyang Technological Uni-
versity, Singapore, in 2005 and 2010, respectively.
From 2009 to 2011, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow
with the University of Maryland, College Park, MD,
USA. From 2012 to 2014, he was a Lecturer with
the Singapore University of Technology and Design,
Singapore. In 2014, he decided to take up a research
intensive role and since an Assistant Professor at
Singapore University of Technology and Design,
Singapore. He received the STUD Outstanding Edu-
cation Award - Excellence in Teaching in 2015 and Best Student Paper
Finalist for the IEEE ROBIO 2006. His research interests include mechatron-
ics, medical robotics, sensing, control, mechanism design, and disturbance
compensation.