A Textile‐Based Optical Force Myography (oFMG) Human‐Machine Interface for Gesture Recognition

Wearable human‐machine interfaces (HMIs) are vital for seamless interactions between humans and machines in wearable assistive and rehabilitative technologies, digital, and mixed environments. Here, an innovative non‐invasive, lightweight, comfortable, and wearable HMI is introduced for gesture recognition. The proposed HMI combines reliable soft optical waveguide sensing mechanism and comfortable‐on‐human‐skin textile structures to create flat and thin textile‐based optical force myography (oFMG) sensors that can detect pressure signals generated from muscle activities. Constructed mostly from textiles, the presented oFMG sensors offer excellent wearability together with highly sensitive, stable, and durable sensing performance. Leveraging the high‐quality signals of the textile oFMG sensors and machine learning algorithms, a forearm‐worn textile oFMG armband developed can achieve the highest offline gesture recognition accuracy of 99.80%. The capabilities of the textile oFMG sensors in this study are demonstrated as wearable HMIs for control of a computer game and a robotic prosthetic hand, highlighting the promising potential of the textile oFMG HMI for a wide range of applications, from control interfaces in digital or mixed environment to gesture recognition systems for biomedical assistive and rehabilitative technologies.