CapBand: Baery-free successive capacitance sensing wristband for hand gesture recognition

Hoang Truong, Shuo Zhang, Ufuk Muncuk, Phuc Nguyen, Nam Bui, Anh Nguyen, Qin Lv, Kaushik Chowdhury, Thang Dinh, Tam Vu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

87 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present CapBand, a battery-free hand gesture recognition wearable in the form of a wristband. The key challenges in creating such a system are (1) to sense useful hand gestures at ultra-low power so that the device can be powered by the limited energy harvestable from the surrounding environment and (2) to make the system work reliably without requiring training every time a user puts on the wristband. We present successive capacitance sensing, an ultra-low power sensing technique, to capture small skin deformations due to muscle and tendon movements on the user’s wrist, which corresponds to specic groups of wrist muscles representing the gestures being performed. We build a wrist muscles-to-gesture model, based on which we develop a hand gesture classication method using both motion and static features. To eliminate the need for per-usage training, we propose a kernel-based on-wrist localization technique to detect the CapBand’s position on the user’s wrist. We prototype CapBand with a custom-designed capacitance sensor array on two exible circuits driven by a custom-built electronic board, a heterogeneous material-made, deformable silicone band, and a custom-built energy harvesting and management module. Evaluations on 20 subjects show 95.0% accuracy of gesture recognition when recognizing 15 dierent hand gestures and 95.3% accuracy of on-wrist localization.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSenSys 2018 - Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages54-67
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359528
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 4 2018
Event16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SENSYS 2018 - Shenzhen, China
Duration: Nov 4 2018Nov 7 2018

Publication series

NameSenSys 2018 - Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems

Conference

Conference16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, SENSYS 2018
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShenzhen
Period11/4/1811/7/18

Keywords

  • Battery-free
  • Capacitance sensing
  • Wristband

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