2015-432 – Tomo: Wearable, Low-Cost Electrical Impedance Tomography for Non-Invasive Gesture Recognition

The system described herein provides a small, low- powered and low-cost ElT sensor that could be integrated into wearable devices, such as but not limited to smartwatches. This ability to non-invasively look inside a user’s body presents interesting application possibilities. For example, muscles change their cross-sectional shape and impedance distribution when flexed. Therefore, in one example embodiment, the EIT sensor was used for gesture recognition. This example system, designed as a sensing armband that can be worn on the wrist or arm was evaluated in a user study with vaying gesture sets. Results showed that the wrist location achieved 97% and 87% accuracies on these gesture sets respectively, while the arm location achieved 93% and 81%. The present invention was also implemented into a smartwatch to demonstrate the utility of this approach, allowing for hand gestures and direct touch manipulation to work synergistically to support interactive tasks on small screens. Cindy Lou Chepanoske cchepano@andrew.cmu.edu 412-268-2979