Best Practices for Model Calibration in Smartphone-based Indoor Positioning Systems

User location and tracking information are increasingly used for contact tracing and social community detection. Indoor positioning and indoor navigation systems are reaching good performances in several realistic scenarios. After an evaluation exclusively done through simulations, nowadays, these systems are trying to reach robust performances and good accuracy in heterogeneous environments. Problems are manifold as each environment presents a structure that strongly affects inertial sensors and radio signal propagation. Generally, systems showing the best performances rely on an extended knowledge of the indoor map. Moreover, they implement a model for pedestrian dynamics in terms of e.g step length, stride and the behaviour of the target users. Experimental results obtained during realistic indoor competitions, clearly show that performances drop when such systems are used in unseen scenarios in which an external user test the proposed solution. In fact, many parameters that are generally calibrated and set to maximize the performances might not work as expected. In this paper, we highlight which best practices should be applied for model calibration in smartphone-based indoor positioning systems. We describe a reference system based on a particle filter, and we show the most relevant parameters and the main factors that are generally in common with all similar systems in the literature. We also present the Run-Once tool for reaching optimal parameters, highlighting those best practices that should be applied to indoor positioning systems to maximize their performances and improve their robustness.