Development of finger-motion capturing device based on optical linear encoder

This article presents the design and validation of a wearable glove-based multifinger-motion capture device (SmartGlove), specifically focusing on the development of a new optical linear encoder (OLE). The OLE specially designed for this project is compact and lightweight and has low-power consumption. The characterization tests showed that the OLE's digital output has good linearity and is accurate. The first prototype of SmartGlove, which uses 10 OLEs to capture the flexion/extension motion of the 14 finger joints, was constructed based on the multipoint-sensing method. A user study evaluated the SmartGlove using a standard protocol and found high repeatability and reliability in both the gripped and flat-hand positions compared with four other evaluated data gloves using the same protocol.