Finger Joint Angle Estimation from Electrical Contact Resistance According to Wrist Shape

Abstract

Hand motion capture is an important topic for understanding the mechanism of the hand. General hand motion capture methods using cameras or bending sensors can capture the limited action in the restricted environments. This study proposes a novel hand motion capture method without restrictions of usage environment and user's action. The proposed method is based on the electrical contact resistance between the wrist skin and the electrode to measure the deformation of the wrist which is related to the hand motion. We fabricate the contact resistance measurement circuit consists of 3 electrodes and a multiplexer. The output voltage corresponding to each contact resistance of the electrode is measured with the circuit by switching the active electrode temporally. We confirm that the output voltage is related to the wrist shape and changes according to the hand posture. Furthermore, the result suggests that the finger joint angles can be estimated from the output voltage due to the correlation between them.