Floor Localization based on Mobile Phone Sensing

In this paper, we present FTrack, a novel floor localization system leveraging on smartphone’s accelerometer only, and it does not require any prior knowledge of a building such as floor height. Through crowdsourcing, FTrack finds the mapping from the traveling time (when taking the elevator) or the step counts (when walking on the stairs) between any two floors to the number of floor levels. The mapping can then be used for mobile users to pinpoint their current floor levels.

This work has been reported in PerCom 2012.