How to Use Accelerometer to Measure Distance for Android Application Development

How to use Accelerometer to measure distance for Android Application Development

You get position by integrating the linear acceleration twice but the error is horrible. It is useless in practice.

Here is an explanation why (Google Tech Talk) at 23:20. I highly recommend this video.

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What is the real world accuracy of phone accelerometers when used for positioning?

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It is not possible: due to the low sensitivity of the built-in accelerometers and the so weak accelerations that are created when a person walks.

Not having network does not mean that GPS does not work ...

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One way to go about it is using the accelerometer data. Your app should continuously record the accelerometer data after the user presses the Start button. You will observe a peak in your data whenever the user takes a step. Apply a filter on this data, and you shall be able to detect the number of steps taken with reasonable accuracy. Multiply it by the step length and you should get an approximation of the distance travelled. Take height of the user as an input argument. Step length is around 0.45*Height of a person. Since this approach is independent of GPS, It will also work indoors.
EDIT:
You'll need to use the accelerometer values for all three axes to make it fairly independent of the device orientation.You can go with x^2 + y^2 + z^2

how to calculate phone's movement in the vertical direction from rest?

If you integrate the acceleration twice you get position but the error is horrible. It is useless in practice. Here is an explanation why (Google Tech Talk) at 23:20. I highly recommend this video.

Now, you do not need anything accurate and that is a different story. The linear acceleration is available after sensor fusion, as described in the video. See Sensor.TYPE_LINEAR_ACCELERATION at SensorEvent. I would first try a high-pass filter to detect sudden increase in the linear acceleration along the vertical axis.

I have no idea whether it is good for your application.

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The Google Distance Matrix API

Can't take credit for the answer, I got it from Another post

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