Long-term Performance Evaluation of a Foot-mounted Pedestrian Navigation Device

In this paper, we present a long term experimental study performed on a foot mounted pedestrian navigation device, the Osmium MIMU22BTP, which is based on the OpenShoe platform. The aim of the study is to investigate the performance that can be expected in mass market applications. Accordingly, we investigate the error characteristics over a large number of tracking devices and their alternative mounting schemes, over several wearers, and over different walking scenarios. By a massive data collection corresponding to more than 150 km of elapsed walking distance over almost 1,000 independent tests, the law of large numbers provides us with illustrative rule-of-thumbs for the tracking performance in realistic use cases. We observe no outlier performance and relative errors less than 4% in 95% of the test-cases, indicating its potential for a variety of indoor Location Based Services (LBS) and IoT applications based on foot-mounted inertial sensing and dead reckoning. The experimental findings are validated with long distance walks.