Step-Length Estimation During Movement on Stairs

Indoor positioning is required for a variety of applications such as mapping, entertainment, security and healthcare. One of the approaches for indoor navigation is pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR). This approach uses low-cost smartphone based inertial sensors and is usually applied for horizontal positioning. Yet in many situations, a change in the pedestrian altitude occurs in indoor environments, for example while using staircases, elevators or escalators. In this paper, we derive, in a PDR framework, a vertical positioning approach based on the smartphone inertial sensors to enable three dimensional positioning. Experiments results using five different staircases validate and show the contribution of the proposed approach.