Energy Efficient Assisted GPS Measurement and Path Reconstruction for People Tracking

In the use of a wearable GPS and cellular tracker for applications such as elderly tracking, device power consumption is an important consideration. To save power, assisted GPS (AGPS) location fixes should not be performed frequently. On the other hand, we also do not want to lose important information about the user´s mobility patterns and routines. To solve this dilemma, in this paper, we present the design of a system that intelligently schedules on-line AGPS location fixes only when necessary based on information extracted from user´s historical mobility data, and then reconstruct the user path based on these sparsely taken on-line location fixes. Experimental results show that our on-line algorithm can significantly reduce the number of AGPS fixes needed and the reconstruction method works well without a priori knowledge of a map and streets information.