Development of a wearable sensing glove for measuring the motion of fingers using linear potentiometers and flexible wires

Abstract

In this paper, a wearable sensing glove for measuring the motion of the fingers is proposed. The system consists of linear potentiometers, flexible wires, and linear springs, which makes it compact and lightweight so that it does not interfere with the natural motion of the fingers. Inspired by the way wrinkles on finger joints are smoothed out when the finger is flexed, a flexible wire is attached to the back of each finger. As the flexible wire moves due to the motion of the finger, the joint angles are calculated by measuring the change in length of wire. Linear potentiometers with linear springs were used to maintain the tension of the wires in order to measure the wire length change consistently. Because the motion of the proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joint is dependent on that of the distal interphalangeal (DIP) joint, only two linear potentiometers were used for each finger. A compact sensing module including 10 linear potentiometers and springs was attached to a glove. The proposed system can widely be applied for the systems, which require to measure finger motions accurately, e.g., virtual reality or teleoperation systems. Such feasible applications were actually implemented and introduced in this paper.