Finger Joint Angle Estimation from Electrical Contact Resistance

Abstract

Hand motion capture is an important topic for understanding the mechanism of the hand. General hand motion capture methods using cameras or bent 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' 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 three electrodes and a multiplexer. The output voltage corresponding to each contact resistance of the electrode is measured with the circuit by switching the working 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. C⃝ 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 100(6): 35-44, 2017; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).