Smart Rings vs. Smartwatches: Utilizing Motion Sensors for Gesture Recognition

Abstract

Since electronic components are constantly getting smaller and smaller, sensors and logic boards can be fitted into smaller enclosures. This miniaturization lead to the development of smart rings containing motion sensors. These sensors of smart rings can be used to recognize hand/finger gestures enabling natural interaction. Unlike vision-based systems, wearable systems do not require a special infrastructure to operate in. Smart rings are highly mobile and are able to communicate wirelessly with various devices. They could potentially be used as a touchless user interface for countless applications, possibly leading to new developments in many areas of computer science and human–computer interaction. Specifically, the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of a custom-built smart ring and of a smartwatch are used to train multiple machine learning models. The accuracy of the models is compared to evaluate whether smart rings or smartwatches are better suited for gesture recognition tasks. All the real-time data processing to predict 12 different gesture classes is done on a smartphone, which communicates wirelessly with the smart ring and the smartwatch. The system achieves accuracy scores of up to 98.8%, utilizing different machine learning models. Each machine learning model is trained with multiple different feature vectors in order to find optimal features for the gesture recognition task. A minimum accuracy threshold of 92% was derived from related research, to prove that the proposed system is able to compete with state-of-the-art solutions.