Smartphone Location Recognition: A Deep Learning-Based Approach

One of the approaches for indoor positioning using smartphones is pedestrian dead reckoning. There, the user step length is estimated using empirical or biomechanical formulas. Such calculation was shown to be very sensitive to the smartphone location on the user. In addition, knowledge of the smartphone location can also help for direct step-length estimation and heading determination. In a wider point of view, smartphone location recognition is part of human activity recognition employed in many fields and applications, such as health monitoring. In this paper, we propose to use deep learning approaches to classify the smartphone location on the user, while walking, and require robustness in terms of the ability to cope with recordings that differ (in sampling rate, user dynamics, sensor type, and more) from those available in the train dataset. The contributions of the paper are: (1) Definition of the smartphone location recognition framework using accelerometers, gyroscopes, and deep learning; (2) examine the proposed approach on 107 people and 31 h of recorded data obtained from eight different datasets; and (3) enhanced algorithms for using only accelerometers for the classification process. The experimental results show that the smartphone location can be classified with high accuracy using only the smartphone’s accelerometers.