What is Dead Reckoning

With the ongoing diffusion of mobile computing and context-aware applications, knowledge of the current location of an individual can be leveraged in a number of different domains, from personal diaries and fitness-related applications to human behavior analysis and targeted advertising. This article presents a review of past research works describing techniques for utilizing smartphone sensors to identify the environment where a smartphone user is located. The review focuses on studies where user location can be computed autonomously and continuously by a smartphone, without the need for an active involvement of the user, and where issues such as power consumption and dependence of sensor readings from the on-body position of the phone are addressed.