Smartphone mode classification is essential to many applications, such as daily life monitoring, healthcare, and indoor positioning. In the latter, it was shown that knowledge of the smartphone location on pedestrians can improve the positioning accuracy. Most of the research conducted in this field is focused on pedestrian motion in a horizontal plane.

In this research, we use supervised machine learning techniques to recognize and classify the smartphone mode (text, talk, pocket and swing) while accounting for the movement up and down stairs. We distinguish between the going up and the down motion, each with four different smartphone modes, making 8 states in total. This classification is based on the use of an optimal set of sensors that varies according to battery life and the energy consumption of each sensor.

The classifier was trained and tested on a data set constructed from multiple user measurements (total of 94 minutes) to achieve robustness. This provided an accuracy of more than 90% in cross validation method and 91.5% if the texting mode is excluded. When considering only stairs motion, regardless of the direction, the accuracy improves to 97%. These results may assist many algorithms, mainly in pedestrian dead reckoning, in improving a variety of challenges such as speed and step length estimation and cumulative error reduction.