A Fully-Coupled Hybrid IEEE 802.15.4a Ultra- Wideband/Inertial Sensor Platform for Wearable Applications

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) transceivers and low-cost micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS) based inertial sensors are proving a promising hybrid combination for location specific wearable applications. The integration of UWB and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) has two primary benefits. Firstly, IMU data can be employed to compute the travelled trajectory when UWB measurements are absent due to range limitations or adverse non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions, and secondly, UWB-based positioning can supplement IMU data to discriminate between accurate measurements and data corrupted by noise and drift. To date however proposed solutions have implemented the two technologies in isolation where the IMU navigation and UWB ranging execute separately and their respective data are fused a posteriori using particle or Kalman filte