Team at Georgia Tech Demonstrate FingerPing, a Wearable Prototype That Recognizes Hand Gestures

May 2018 – Researchers at Georgia Tech, led by doctoral student, Cheng Zhang, have developed a proof-of-concept device called FingerPing which can recognize hand gestures. The prototype consists of a ring worn around the thumb and a smartwatch-like wristband and uses acoustic “chirps” that the system recognizes as corresponding to distinct hand poses. Speaking to its use of sound to detect and define hand positions, Zhang said, "The injected sound from the thumb will travel at different paths inside the body with different hand postures. For instance, when your hand is open, there is only one direct path from the thumb to the wrist. Any time you do a gesture where you close a loop, the sound will take a different path, and that will form a unique signature."

 

The system can recognize twenty-two different micro finger gestures using the twelve bones of the fingers, allowing for gestures such as counting one through ten using American Sign Language. FingerPing was presented at the 2018 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). The paper is titled FingerPing: Recognizing Fine-grained Hand Poses Using Active Acoustic On-body Sensing (Cheng Zhang, Qiuyue Xue, Anandghan Waghmare, Ruichen Meng, Sumeet Jain, Yizeng Han, Xinyu Li, Kenneth Cunefare, Thomas Ploetz, Thad Starner, Omer Inan, Gregory Abowd). [Source: Ben Coxworth, New Atlas; David Mitchell, Georgia Tech News Center.]