Smart Glove Turns Hand-Waving Into Text
Is that person gesticulating on the street corner insane? Or just an early adopter of the latest interface tech? Neuroscientists have developed a fingerless glove that automatically translates hand motions into text by way of electrode sensors. Michael Linderman and his colleagues published the results of the first phase of their research project in last Wednesday's PLoS ONE. In this phase, six volunteers, using a digital pen, wrote the numerals 0 to 9 fifty times while wearing the prototype glove, which recorded the electrical activity of eight muscles in their hand and forearms. A computer correlated the electrical data with the output from the digital pen, and pattern recognition taught the computer to derive written symbols from the bursts of electrical activity. Linderman's team also used a technique called discriminate analysis to test how well the computer could recognize muscle-movement patterns as corresponding with particular written...