Ryan K Burns

Title: Ryan K. Burns and Pedestrian Dead Reckoning

Introduction

Ryan K. Burns is an inventor associated with Santa Clara, California, and Apple Inc. His patent work addresses pedestrian dead reckoning, a method for estimating a person’s movement using motion-sensor data from a mobile device.

Latest Patents

Burns is credited with 1 patent: “Pedestrian Dead Reckoning Using Differential Geometric Properties of Human Gait.” The invention describes receiving acceleration data from a motion sensor carried by a user and representing that data as a three-dimensional space curve. The curve reflects the cyclical vertical movement and side-to-side sway of the user’s center of mass while walking.

The method computes a tangent-normal-binormal reference frame to characterize the curve’s geometric and kinematic properties over time. It then estimates the user’s direction of travel from the orientation of the unit binormal vector and estimates walking speed using a linear regression model applied to the reference frame’s kinematic properties.

Career Highlights

The patent connects Burns’s work with mobile-device sensing and pedestrian navigation. By using patterns in human gait, the described approach aims to estimate direction and speed from motion data without relying solely on external positioning signals.

Collaborations

Burns is associated with Apple Inc. His coworker, Xiaoyuan Tu, is also named in the information provided about his professional collaborations.

Conclusion

Ryan K. Burns’s patent applies differential geometry to gait-sensor data to estimate a pedestrian’s direction and speed, illustrating an approach to navigation using mobile-device motion sensing.