In order to find the most direct path to Sarah, the wearable has to master navigation perfectly. But Tom's smartwatch provides inaccurate data, fails to recognize his current location properly and thus leads him in the wrong direction several times. Because of urban canyons such as high buildings, underpasses or rural areas, the device often lacks reliable GPS or the signal even gets lost completely.

For Tom´s smartwatch, power consumption is crucial because the space for batteries in small device is limited. This is also true for other types of wearable devices such as hearables. In addition, both navigating with GPS and high sensor performance quickly drain battery life. Power-efficient sensors with smart power management features, and yet also high precision, are thus key.

Sarah gives Tom a second chance. He wants to arrive on time by using a new smartwatch with pedestrian position tracking, enabled by the smart sensor BHI160BP. The sensor combines an accelerometer and a gyroscope with a microcontroller and advanced algorithms for pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR). To maintain accuracy, it tracks the users' position, calculates their relative location and then wakes up the GPS module only every few minutes in order to obtain an absolute position. This drastically extends the device's operating time.

Tom's new smartwatch is still almost fully charged when he arrives at the destination for his date. The BHI160BP saves up to 80% in system power consumption compared with a typical GPS-only solution – without compromising on accuracy. It is the industry’s first position-tracking smart sensor that utilizes integrated motion sensors to improve GPS location tracking. This new position-tracking approach is set to enable a new class of compact devices with even smaller batteries.