Developing smartphone-based indoor localization systems for the disabled: a method to estimate the accelerometers' offset

The recent wide availability of smartphone devices may allow for approaches to indoor localization that rely on the phone inertial sensors (inertial localization) to be used in the development of mobile apps intended to improve disabled people’s mobility. However, the most critical issue when using inertial sensors (accelerometers, gyroscopes) is the poor localization accuracy, due to the well-known drift error in the position estimation. We developed a method to quantify the offset of triaxial accelerometers included in smartphones, which represents one of the main sources of drift error in inertial localization systems.