Passive Ring Sensors for Interfacing with Wearable Systems
We have developed a system for wireless capture of gesture, useful, for example, when interacting with a wearable display or other mobile computing environment where a keyboard isn't appropriate. The aim is to develop small RFID-queried passive sensors on the fingertips of a user, interrogated by a reader mounted near a sleeve, for example. This allows the fingers to be free while enabling simple gesture, such as finger curl and touch, to be reliably detected. We have developed an early implementation exploiting off-the-shelf hardware with a simple gestural vocabulary to show a working demonstration of this concept. More details on this system are elucidated in the paper that we presented at the 2011 Body Sensor Nets (BSN) Conference linked below.
Link here for a video clip showing Rachel doing a simple demo of our prototype system controlling a Windows GUI. It's certainly early, and somewhat slow and bulky, but works and can be optimized and shrunk down as discussed in our paper below.
Link below for a paper overviewing the system:
Wireless Hand Gesture Capture Through Wearable Passive Tag Sensing, Rachel Bainbridge and, Joseph A. Paradiso. In Proceedings of BSN2011Dallas, TX ,May 23-25, 2011.
Link below for Rachel Bainbridge's M.Eng. Thesis detailing her work:
Rachel Bainbridge -- HCI Gesture Tracking Using Wearable Passive Tags (pdf) August 2010.
We thank Yael McGuire of ThingMagic for his RFID advice and technical support, as well as Josh Smith, Jeff Braun, and the WISP team at Intel Seattle for giving us the WISP system and helping us get going with it.