How does the phone calculate steps and track your movement accurately?

 

If you own a smartphone that came out in the last few years, this phone most likely has a special health-related app, and if you've used that app, you've probably noticed that it measures the number of steps you actually walk as well as physical exertion like calories burned and other vital indicators such as oxygen levels in the blood.

 

But have you ever asked yourself how your phone calculates your steps while walking or running? How does this little device know if you're walking or standing for a while? Have you ever been curious to know the secret behind phones tracking our movement? Well, let's make the answer simpler below.

 

For many, there is an answer ready to the question posed at the front, an answer that seems simple and compelling at first glance: GPS location services — yes, an answer that makes a lot of sense since the phone tracks your geographical location from one place to another, measuring the distance traveled and dividing it by the average length steps, it gives you the exact number of them. It makes sense, and there are rare cases where this method is actually used, but the most common, accurate, and certainly the most interesting method seems different.

 

So, how does a phone count your steps exactly?

 

Let's start the answer by looking at something else which when you switch your phone from portrait to landscape, it rotates the screen on its own (if you've enabled that feature from settings)...how does the phone know if it's in landscape or portrait mode? Simply, through a set of sensors built into it that measure accelerometer, which enables the device to know its orientation relative to the Earth.

 

It does this by measuring the Earth's gravitational acceleration at nearly every moment, and depending on the direction of gravity, the phone is aware of the moment when it's heading up or down. Have you ever wondered how to control cars in mobile racing games by moving and tilting the phone? The answer is also the accelerometer.

 

The accelerometer-based measurement steps may seem a bit strange, especially to those who are not familiar with the term and do not have enough knowledge of the matter. But we'll explain that concept to you in its simplest form: acceleration is a change in velocity. In contrast to velocity, acceleration is easier to measure because it expresses the force of gravity related to gravitational acceleration.

 

In general, acceleration (change of speed) can be measured much easier and more accurately than the speed itself, for example, if you are in the air on a plane, you will not feel its speed at all even though it is very fast, but the moments of take-off from the airport in which there will be a change in speed The plane will definitely be noticeable

 

This was a brief definition of the term accelerometer, which is the most important factor in the phone's ability to track the user and count their steps accurately. But there remains a final decision point regarding the matter, which is the relationship between acceleration and walking. It's pretty straightforward and I'll show you how. Walking is not a completely stable activity unlike moving a car for example, so when you are going straight you are actually accelerating before you stop for a while and then accelerating back in your next step, so your acceleration is in the form of successive ups and downs if that acceleration is displayed on the indicator My statement.

 

Do you want to try it for yourself and make sure of that process? You can install the Sensor Test application on your Android phone and test the acceleration sensor, or if you are using a Samsung phone, open the communication application in your phone and enter “star window zero star window” and the interface for testing the phone will appear in front of you, which gives you access to options related to the acceleration sensor And monitor all changes related to it on a graphic indicator. Here you can actually start the experiment and walk and then pause and repeat as you like, and the zigzags will appear in the graph in front of you that represents your steps, while the flat area indicates the moment you stopped and when the phone was stationary.

 

Just observing these zigzags is not completely accurate and is not a good measure to take, otherwise, any sudden movement will be counted as an extra step, so here comes the role of technology inside phones which contains algorithms specifically designed in order not to interfere with the usual shape zigzags of steps with those resulting from sudden movements. So your phone simply has a near-perfect step-counting mechanism with effective accuracy and does not depend at all on any other aids inside the phone such as GPS technology.

 

What is even more impressive is that the whole process does not consume a lot of battery power at all since accelerometer sensors are famous for being extremely energy efficient and generally not using much phone hardware.

 

How do accelerometer sensors work?

 

We think that at that point you have become fully acquainted with the way the phone counts the steps of the user and tracks it, etc. and that the whole process is only about monitoring the accelerometer and nothing more, but the most important question that imposes itself after that is how do those sensors for the accelerometer work?

 

The answer, quite simply, is to measure the electric current from certain instruments. For example, a very small piece of quartz stone is used that introduces an electric potential when it is subjected to pressure due to acceleration (acceleration is closely related to force as mentioned above) and by measuring the potential provided by several pieces of quartz With a different orientation, acceleration can be known with relative accuracy after subtracting gravity from the equation as being relatively constant.

 

In terms of step counting, relying on accelerometer sensors is often more than enough, in fact, but those sensors usually work in tandem with a magnetic sensor as well.

 

Conclusion: Have you been super curious about how the phone tracks and counts our steps correctly? We hope that the accelerometer has proven useful to you after reading our article today and that it is not just a worthless sensor that has been added to the phone in vain. It is a physical process, and some of its stages may be complicated, but explaining and understanding it fully is the greatest thing!