Evaluating touchless capacitive gesture recognition as an assistive device for upper extremity mobility impairment

INTRODUCTION: This paper explores the feasibility of using touchless textile sensors as an input to environmental control for individuals with upper-extremity mobility impairments. These sensors are capacitive textile sensors embedded into clothing and act as proximity sensors. METHODS: We present results from five individuals with spinal cord injury as they perform gestures that mimic an alphanumeric gesture set. The gestures are used for controlling appliances in a home setting. Our setup included a custom visualization that provides feedback to the individual on how the system is tracking the movement and the type of gesture being recognized. Our study included a two-stage session at a medical school with five subjects with upper extremity mobility impairment. RESULTS: The experimenting sessions derived binary gesture classification accuracies greater than 90% on average. The sessions also revealed intricate details in participant’s motions, from which we draw two key insights on the design of the wearable sensor system. CONCLUSION: First, we provide evidence that personalization is a critical ingredient to the success of wearable sensing in this population group. The sensor hardware, the gesture set, and the underlying gesture recognition algorithm must be personalized to the individual’s need and injury level. Secondly, we show that explicit feedback to the user is useful when the user is being trained on the system. Moreover, being able to see the end goal of controlling appliances using the system is a key motivation to properly learn gestures.