Gradient profiling for pedestrian services

Mobile systems have long been the cause of distraction to pedestrians. Motivated by the safety challenges this distraction poses, we aim to develop a sensing technology based on smartphones and wearable devices, for fine-grained location classification in urban environments. Particularly, we are using shoe mounted inertial sensors to sense the ground a pedestrian is walking on. To begin with, it seeks to detect transitions from sidewalk locations to in-street locations. This can be used for warning a distracted pedestrian or alerting an oncoming vehicle to the presence of a pedestrian in street. In addition, it can also be used for precise sidewalk-level localization in dense urban environments.