Sensor fusion-based infrastructure independent and agile real-time indoor positioning technology for disabled and elderly people

The aging of population is the grim reality which world is facing in the twenty-first century. At the same time, rates of disability are increasing due to population ageing and increases in chronic health conditions. These bring great challenge to elderly and disabled care in the whole society, since their physiological and pathological characteristics always bring them many inconveniences. In order to better serve the disabled and elderly people and provide them timely care in some public places, it is important to be aware of the location of them. At present, this has been a key focus that includes determining their physical location accurately and turning coordinates into meaningful information. This paper provides a sensor fusion-based infrastructure independent and agile real-time indoor positioning technology which can be used in monitoring the exact three-dimensional indoor location of the elderly and disabled people. It takes advantage of the built-in sensors in the wearable devices to analyze human movement and combine the map information to improve the location accuracy. The most prominent feature of method is that it requires no training or extra infrastructure. The experimental results show that the algorithm obtains high localization precision and preferable robustness.