Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Anand Balakrishnan

Arvind Thiagarajan

James J Wolfe

Techniques are described for determining a direction in which a computing device is being transported by a user who is walking, running, or otherwise moving relative to a direction in which the device is being held. Acceleration data may be collected by accelerometers of the device during a time window, and transformed to determine a rotated acceleration along one or more candidate directions. The rotated acceleration is transformed to a frequency domain, and a peak power is determined within the frequency transformed acceleration data for each candidate direction. The peak powers are compared across multiple candidate directions, and the candidate direction having a higher peak power may be designated as a movement direction of the device relative to the device orientation. A gross movement direction may be determined based on magnetometer data, and may be employed for navigation or other applications.

Growing community of inventors

Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Anand Balakrishnan