WINK, BMBF

Recognize hand movements – gesture control using an intelligent bracelet

 

Funded by the BMBF
Duration: 2020-2024

 
Project partners
Berlin University of Applied Sciences and Technology
Kinemic GmbH, Karlsruhe
tech-solute Industriedienstleistungen für die technische Produktinnovation GmbH & Co. KG, Bruchsal

Motivation
Digital technology is increasingly being integrated into everyone’s everyday life – whether in the smart home, intelligent glasses, cars, or assistance systems for care, work and leisure. However, these devices and their environments often lack natural user interfaces and interaction paradigms that enable simple, intuitive and low-threshold use.

Goals and approach
The WINK project aims to close this critical gap in human-technology interaction. The aim of the project is to develop a comfortable, intelligent bracelet that can detect finger and hand movements via integrated sensors and thus produce robust, intuitive and mobile gesture control for the first time. For this purpose, a new kind of motion detection is possible on the hardware side through innovative use of sensors. In conjunction with the most modern machine learning methods and a user-centered development process, this is integrated into an overall system and evaluated in accompanying user studies.

Innovations and perspectives
The hands and fingers, as primary tools in the physical world, should be used to interact with digital devices. Recognizing grasping gestures makes it possible, for example, to actually “grab” virtual objects or buttons. In this way, skills from the physical world can be transferred to the digital world. This enables intuitive use of technologies across all ages and linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Project-related publications

Jan Willms, Maximilian Letter, Emile Marchandise, and Katrin Wolf. 2023. Pull Outperforms Push as Vibrotactile Wristband Feedback for Mid-Air Gesture Guidance. In Proceedings of Mensch und Computer 2023 (MuC ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 138–148. https://doi.org/10.1145/3603555.3603579