Magnetic Hand Tracking for Human-Computer Interface

Hand motion tracking is useful in human-computer interface and many other applications requiring human-machine interactions. In this work, permanent magnets and contactless magnetic sensors are used to track finger motion. A magnet patch is affixed to each fingernail to mark the location and orientation of the fingertip. When fingers move, the combined magnetic fields produced by the magnets at fingertips are recorded by a set of magnetic sensors around a wristband. The recorded data from the sensors are utilized to calculate the magnets' locations and orientations, which can provide estimate of the hand posture based on a geometric hand model.