GESTO: A Glove for Enhanced Sensing and Touching Based on Inertial and Magnetic Sensors for Hand Tracking and Cutaneous Feedback

Abstract

The human hand represents a complex fascinating system with highly sensitive sensory capabilities and dexterous grasping and manipulation functionalities. As a consequence, estimating the hand pose and at the same time having the capability to provide haptic feedback in a wearable way may benefit areas such as rehabilitation, human–robot interaction, gaming, and many more. Existing solutions allow us to accurately measure the hand configuration and provide effective force feedback to the user. However, they have limited wearability/portability. In this paper, we present the wearable sensing/actuation system glove for enhanced sensing and touching (GESTO). It is based on inertial and magnetic sensors for hand tracking, coupled with cutaneous devices for the force feedback rendering. Unlike vision-based tracking systems, the sensing glove does not suffer from occlusion problems and lighting conditions. We properly designed the cutaneous devices in order to reduce possible interferences with the magnetic sensors and performed an experimental validation on ten healthy subjects. In order to measure the estimation accuracy of GESTO, we used a high-precision optical tracker. A comparison between using the glove with and without the haptic devices shows that the presence of them does not induce a statistically significant increase in the estimation error. Experimental results revealed the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The accuracy of our system, $3.32^\circ$ mean estimation error in the worst case, is comparable with the human ability of discriminating finger joint angle.