A novel step counter supporting for indoor positioning based on inertial measurement unit

Step counter provides important information on various kinds of applications such as itinerary, exercise, health, etc. Especially, step counter is a very essential part for indoor positioning system in detecting exactly number of steps and supporting to find out the most suitable indoor position of people we want to track. In this paper, we proposed to develop a step counter system with high accuracy in comparison with the commercial applications. The proposed system is using the inertial measurement unit MPU9250 which consists of 3-DOF gyroscope and 3-DOF accelerometer; these sensors were calibrated carefully to avoid drift error. Furthermore, nRF24L01 wireless data transmitter/receiver is integrated for added convenience for users. After preprocessing, the recorded data are extracted from this IMU will be combined with step detection algorithm to find out the number of steps. The proposed algorithm was tested carefully with promising results of 96.5% in accuracy.