Lightweight assistive technology: A wearable, optical-fiber gesture recognition system

The goal of this project is to create an inexpensive, lightweight, wearable assistive device that can measure hand or finger movements accurately enough to identify a range of hand gestures. One eventual application is to provide assistive technology and sign language detection for the hearing impaired. My system, called LiTe (Light-based Technology), uses optical fibers embedded into a wristband. The wrist is an optimal place for the band since the light propagation in the optical fibers is impacted even by the slight movements of the tendons in the wrist when gestures are performed. The prototype incorporates light dependent resistors to measure these light propagation changes. When creating LiTe, I considered a variety of fiber materials, light frequencies, and physical shapes to optimize the tendon movement detection so that it can be accurately correlated with different gestures. I implemented and evaluated two approaches for gesture recognition. The first uses an algorithm that combines moving averages of sensor readings with gesture sensor reading signatures to determine the current gesture. The second uses a neural network trained on a labelled set of gesture readings to recognize gestures. Using the signature-based approach, I was able to achieve a 99.8% accuracy at recognizing distinct gestures. Using the neural network the recognition accuracy was 98.8%. This shows that high accuracy is feasible using both approaches. The results indicate that this novel method of using fiber optics-based sensors is a promising first step to creating a gesture recognition system.