Pedestrian Tracking with Shoe-Mounted Inertial Sensors

A navigation system that tracks the location of a person on foot is useful for finding and rescuing firefighters or other emergency first responders, or for location-aware computing, personal navigation assistance, mobile 3D audio, and mixed or augmented reality applications. One of the main obstacles to the real-world deployment of location-sensitive wearable computing, including mixed reality (MR), is that current position-tracking technologies require an instrumented, marked, or premapped environment. At InterSense, we've developed a system called NavShoe, which uses a new approach to position tracking based on inertial sensing. Our wireless inertial sensor is small enough to easily tuck into the shoelaces,…