aiqbench analysis
This research presents a wrist-worn pressure sensor array capable of estimating full hand pose and contact forces without direct skin contact, addressing critical gaps in haptic feedback and robot learning. By leveraging muscle contraction patterns to infer interaction states, the system complements vision-based methods when hands are occluded, offering a novel data stream for interactive computing and VR applications.
Beyond Gestures: Estimating Full Hand Pose and Contact Forces from Wrist-Worn Pressure Sensor Array
arXiv:2609.16518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capturing hand motion and interaction forces is critical for interactive computing, VR, and high-fidelity tactile demonstrations for robot learning. We introduce a wrist-worn pressure-sensing wristband that recovers continuous full-hand pose and distributed contact force on a single wearable. The system consists of flexible capacitive sensor arrays around the wrist, which require no electrical skin contact, and a recurrent network that maps the resulting pressure signal to hand state. Our key insight is that muscle contraction and tendon displacement produce pressure patterns, which correlate strongly with hand pose and interaction force. To validate this, we collect synchronized recordings of wrist pressure, optical motion-capture hand pose, and tactile-glove interaction force, covering isolated finger motion, fingertip-force stress tests, and natural hand-object manipulation. On isolated single-user motion the wristband attains $4.6^\circ$ mean finger-joint MAE, and across four users manipulating everyday objects it estimates per-finger contact force at $R^2=0.57$, which an external pose signal brings up to $0.75$. We see the wristband as one node in a constellation of everyday wearables -- e.g. paired with an egocentric camera -- adding the contact force that vision cannot observe and taking over when the hand is occluded.
Abstract:Capturing hand motion and interaction forces is critical for interactive computing, VR, and high-fidelity tactile demonstrations for robot learning. We introduce a wrist-worn pressure-sensing wristband that recovers continuous full-hand pose and distributed contact force on a single wearable. The system consists of flexible capacitive sensor arrays around the wrist, which require no electrical skin contact, and a recurrent network that maps the resulting pressure signal to hand state. Our key insight is that muscle contraction and tendon displacement produce pressure patterns, which correlate strongly with hand pose and interaction force. To validate this, we collect synchronized recordings of wrist pressure, optical motion-capture hand pose, and tactile-glove interaction force, covering isolated finger motion, fingertip-force stress tests, and natural hand-object manipulation. On isolated single-user motion the wristband attains $4.6^\circ$ mean finger-joint MAE, and across four users manipulating everyday objects it estimates per-finger contact force at $R^2=0.57$, which an external pose signal brings up to $0.75$. We see the wristband as one node in a constellation of everyday wearables -- e.g. paired with an egocentric camera -- adding the contact force that vision cannot observe and taking over when the hand is occluded.
Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2609.16518 [cs.HC]
(or arXiv:2609.16518v1 [cs.HC] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.16518 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 286 words
