An Easily Customized Gesture Recognizer for Assisted Living Using Commodity Mobile Devices

Automatic gesture recognition is an important field in the area of human-computer interaction. Until recently, the main approach to gesture recognition was based mainly on real time video processing. The objective of this work is to propose the utilization of commodity smartwatches for such purpose. Smartwatches embed accelerometer sensors, and they are endowed with wireless communication capabilities (primarily Bluetooth), so as to connect with mobile phones on which gesture recognition algorithms may be executed. The algorithmic approach proposed in this paper accepts as the input readings from the smartwatch accelerometer sensors and processes them on the mobile phone. As a case study, the gesture recognition application was developed for Android devices and the Pebble smartwatch. This application allows the user to define the set of gestures and to train the system to recognize them. Three alternative methodologies were implemented and evaluated using a set of six 3-D natural gestures. All the reported results are quite satisfactory, while the method based on SAX (Symbolic Aggregate approXimation) was proven the most efficient.