Estimation of heading misalignment between a pedestrian and a wearable device

The wearable devices market has witnessed major technological advancements in recent years. These achievements have greatly increased their ability to be involved in applications such as location-based services (LBS), portable navigation, and guidance applications. In certain applications, providing a navigation solution based on inertial sensors stand-alone requires the user to keep the portable device in a specific orientation with respect to the user´s body. It is unreasonable to assume that the device will remain in a fixed orientation all the time. In this paper, a technique is proposed to provide the heading misalignment angle between the wearable smart device and the pedestrian. Different test scenarios were conducted to assess the performance of the proposed technique including different use cases. The results show that the proposed technique is able to provide continuous and reliable consumer localization without any restrictions on the way the user holds or uses the device.