Smart Living: An Interactive Control System for Household Appliances

Hand-gesture based control has enormous potential both theoretically and for practical applications due to its convenience and intuitiveness. This study presents a real-time interactive control system for household appliances. The interactive control system allowing wireless control of household appliances using a combination of 11 hand gestures and 2 waving motions is tested on hundreds of samples. It is implemented using a regular personal computer (PC) and existing digital single processing (DSP) platforms. The evaluation results show that the system performs efficiently reaching an accuracy recognition rate of 91% and spending around 30 seconds to complete the control operation for household appliances. The contributions of this work are both academic (1) successful demonstration of the integration of algorithms for solving image detection, processing, and pattern recognition, and practical (2) showing its feasibility and using commonly available hardware and software configurations for practical uses, and finally (3) establishing a mechanism for intuitively interactive control system that facilitates smart living.