Estimating Distance of Going Up and down Stairs in a Building Using the Smartphone’s Rotation Vector Sensor

Localization of persons in the building after a disaster occurs is one of prominent issues for rescuing them and also it is technically challenging, considering that communication infrastructures such as cellular or WiFi would be often unavailable due to the severe damage or heavy traffic concentration. This paper focuses on estimating person’s moving distance in the stairs and presents a scheme to estimate only with rotation vector sensor, being typically installed in the recent smartphone. Performance evaluation by experiments shows that the proposed scheme can estimate the number of floors by which the person moved with error of almost zero.