Design of an Assistive Communication Glove Using Combined Sensory Channels

This paper presents a new design of a wireless sensor glove developed for American Sign Language finger spelling gesture recognition. Five contact sensors are installed on the glove, in addition to five flex sensors on the fingers and a 3D accelerometer on the back of the hand. Each pair of flex and contact sensors are combined into the same input channel on the BSN node in order to save the number of channels and the installation area. After which, the signal is analyzed and separated back into flex and contact features by software. With electrical contacts and wirings made of conductive fabric and threads, the glove design has become thinner and more flexible. For validation, ASL finger spelling gesture recognition experiments have been performed on signals collected from six speech-impaired subjects and a normal subject. With the new sensor glove design, the experimental results have shown a significant increase in classification accuracy.