Which way am I facing: inferring horizontal device orientation from an accelerometer signal

We present a method to infer the orientation of mobile device carried in a pocket from the acceleration signal acquired when the user is walking. Whereas previous work has shown how to determine the the orientation in the vertical plane (angle towards earth gravity), we demonstrate how to compute the orientation within the horizontal plane. To validate our method we compare the output of our method with GPS heading information when walking in a straight line. On a total of 16 different orientations and traces we have a mean difference of 5 degrees with 2.5 degrees standard deviation.

Citation

Kunze, K.; Partridge, K.; Begole, J.; Lukowicz, P. Inferring user compass orientation from a randomly-oriented wearable device. International Symposium on Wearable Computing; 2009 September 4-7; Linz, Austria. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE; 2009; 149-150.