Implementation of hand gesture recognition based on flexible sensor array for mobile devices

Abstract

As the digital devices have been developed, hand gesture recognition plays an important role in Human-Computer interface (HCI) for direct interaction without contact. Among them, the non-contact methods do not require attaching sensors to human's body and mostly use visual technologies such as Kinect or camera sensors. Various wearable devices have been developed using contact sensors such as inertial sensor, magnetic sensor, gyro sensor, electromyography (EMG), FSRs, and others to identify gestures. However, various drawbacks remain for these sensor in detecting gestures. In this paper, we propose a new method using strain gauges-based Flexible Epidermal Tactile Sensor Array to overcome the drawbacks of the existing sensors. It acquires electric signals generated according to the movements of the wrist based on strain gauge estimating the degree of deformation such as tension, compression, and twist. The proposed sensor array shows robustness, stability, and repeatability through various experiments for testing the sensor array. Furthermore, the proposed method is verified by confirming gesture recognition accuracy with multiple subjects and has a greater performance than the existing gesture recognition devices in accuracy tests.