UWB-Aided Indoor Pedestrian Monitoring for Ear Wearables

The ultra-wideband (UWB) technology inside ear wearables, besides offering the next alternative to the existing wireless data links, can deliver centimeter-accurate indoor pedestrian monitoring. However, the human body shadowing (HBS) between the ear wearable (UWB tag) and infrastructure sensors (UWB anchors) can result in meter-level errors. This paper enhanced and analyzed the UWB-aided indoor pedestrian monitoring for ear wearables. We applied the UWB anchor-pairs positioning fusion (UAPF) approach to improve the indoor pedestrian monitoring performance in HBS. We conducted an indoor pedestrian walking experiment to evaluate his ear-worn UWB tag’s monitoring accuracy using the head-mounted UWB tag as benchmark and Hokuyo Lidar as ground truth. The experimental results established that the HBS phenomena degrades and the UAPF approach upgrades the accuracy up to 3.19 m and 0.35 m, respectively, in terms of $90^{\text {th }}$ percentile error.