Learning Gestures Using A Passive Data-Glove With RFID Tags

Hand gesture recognition enables non-tactile interfaces for human-machine interactions. Cameras are currently powerful tools to recognize these gestures, however, use of cameras is constrained by privacy concerns and need for welllit, line of sight implementation. In this study, we propose an alternate method to recognize gestures using a passive data-glove augmented with passive RFID tags. We envision passive tags-based gesture recognition will have applications in improving operator safety around machines, activity monitoring in factories and sign to speech recognition, etc. Low-level reader information (RSSI, Phase and Doppler frequency) can be used to capture changes to the tags in the environment, therefore generating enough information to infer gestures. In this paper, we present a technique to enable fast feature recognition using low-level reader data by correcting for inconsistencies in phase data due to frequency hopping. We experimented with four different classifiers on the low-level reader data and our Fully-Connected Neural Network (FCCN) classifier is able to learn gestures from tag-data with 98% accuracy.