Lessons Learned on the Design of Cost-Effective and Highly Compatible Smart Gloves

Wearable devices are gaining increasing interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain as they can improve human-machine interaction and introduce new levels of usability in many different application scenarios.In this context, there are different implementation approaches and it becomes very important to identify tools in line with the specific constraints of a given project, focusing in particular on compatibility and cost-effectiveness in development.This paper presents the prototyping work regarding two wearable devices designed to capture hand motion data. These devices are able to detect hand and single-finger movements and send the data to other devices, with potential application scenarios in gaming, augmented reality control and medical rehabilitation.The first glove prototype, the "flex glove", is based on flex sensors placed on the fingers of an ordinary glove, used as a support, and on a single module containing both a gyroscope and an accelerometer placed on the back of the glove; in this way, the glove can perceive both the movement of the fingers and that of the entire hand by measuring their angular velocity and acceleration.The second prototype, the "gyroscopic glove", is an alternative to the previous one; it is, in fact, entirely based on gyroscopes and accelerometers while reducing production costs and providing better performance.The prototypes use BLE to connect and control other devices, even successfully replacing a Bluetooth mouse and a keyboard in contexts where hands-free use is more effective.