Arduino Hand Sensor
An ongoing personal project to create a homemade, wrist-based sensor that captures the fine-grained gestural movements of a person's hand and fingers (think "Minority Report"). The goal is to keep the sensor simple and inexpensive by making up the difference in the software. Everything will ultimately be open-sourced.
The sensor is mounted on a Slap Bracelet. An Arduino microcontroller board translates analog tendon-pressure signals into digital output. The output is visualized on a Mac using a library developed by "Plusea" from the High-Low Tech group at MIT Media Lab.
One of the earliest prototypes, just a single channel.
Assembling the latest prototype of the five-channel variable pressure sensor. What you see is athletic tape with thin strips of electrically conductive copper fabric, one for each finger.
Small black rectangles of a material called Velostat provide the electrical resistance, and on top of those is electrically conductive silver thread. Thanks to Hannah Perner-Wilson of MIT Media Lab for the Velostat idea.
The latest five-channel variable pressure sensor, finished.
A Slap Bracelet, cut a bit smaller. I could only find one store that carried Slap Bracelets, and they were all animal print.
Measuring the ohmic resistance of my middle finger in the flexed position.
An Arduino microcontroller board translates the analog sensor signals into digital output for visualization on the computer. The board connects to the computer via USB. (This is actually the top of an Arduino motor-driver shield, but it's the only related picture I had handy.)
