Research on HAR-Based Floor Positioning

• Main Authors: Hongxia Qi, Yunjia Wang, Jingxue Bi, Hongji Cao, Shenglei Xu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
• Series: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
• Subjects: floor identification; HAR; acceleration sensor; smartphone; floor positioning
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/10/7/437

Floor positioning is an important aspect of indoor positioning technology, which is closely related to location-based services (LBSs). Currently, floor positioning technologies are mainly based on radio signals and barometric pressure. The former are impacted by the multipath effect, rely on infrastructure support, and are limited by different spatial structures. For the latter, the air pressure changes with the temperature and humidity, the deployment cost of the reference station is high, and different terminal models need to be calibrated in advance. In view of these issues, here, we propose a novel floor positioning method based on human activity recognition (HAR), using smartphone built-in sensor data to classify pedestrian activities. We obtain the degree of the floor change according to the activity category of every step and determine whether the pedestrian completes floor switching through condition and threshold analysis. Then, we combine the previous floor or the high-precision initial floor with the floor change degree to calculate the pedestrians’ real-time floor position. A multi-floor office building was chosen as the experimental site and verified through the process of alternating multiple types of activities. The results show that the pedestrian floor position change recognition and location accuracy of this method were as high as 100%, and that this method has good robustness and high universality. It is more stable than methods based on wireless signals. Compared with one existing HAR-based method and air pressure, the method in this paper allows pedestrians to undertake long-term static or round-trip activities during the process of going up and down the stairs. In addition, the proposed method has good fault tolerance for the misjudgment of pedestrian actions.