Knee and waist attached gyroscopes for personal navigation: Comparison of knee, waist and foot attached inertial sensors

We perform personal navigation using inertial sensors at knee, waist and foot positions. We found out that the knee attached gyroscope gives the best distance traveled information. The proposed system at the knee takes advantage of the fact that the angular displacements repeats at each period (each step of the walking person). Using this period, the system will keep the angular displacement errors bounded. Also, the waist attached gyroscope gives the best heading information. Consequently, we propose a personal navigation system that consists of gyroscopes at the knee and waist. The system performance was evaluated with a number of indoor experiments and the experimental results showed that this configuration provide better position information compared to other configurations. The system performs well even when the person is climbing stairs.