Enhancing Improved Heuristic Drift Elimination for Wrist-Worn PDR Systems in Buildings

Location based services are limited due to the weakness of the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to work properly in indoor and dense urban environments. Among the different technologies proposed to provide indoor positioning, inertial sensors based pedestrian dead-reckoning (PDR) is one of the more cost- effective solutions thanks to no additional infrastructure is needed to be installed, but its performance is time-limited by drift problems. Regarding the heading drift, some heuristics make use of the buildings' dominant directions in order to reduce this problem. In this paper, the method known as improved heuristic drift elimination (iHDE) is enhanced to be implemented in a Step- and-Heading (SHS) based PDR system, that allows to place the inertial sensors in almost any location of the user's body. Particularly, wrist-worn sensors will be used. Tests on synthetically generated and real data show that the iHDE method can be used in a SHS-based PDR without losing its heading drift reduction capability.