My team has been working on a wearable glove to capture data about hand movements, and use it as a human-computer interface for a variety of applications. One of the major applications is the translation of sign language, shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kXrZtdo39k
Right now we can only translate letters and numbers, because the signs for them require the person to hold their hand still in one position ('stationary' signs). I want to be able to translate words as well, which are non-stationary signs. Also the position of the hands really matters when signing words, for example it matters whether the hand is in front of the forehead, eyes, mouth, chest, cheeks, etc.
For this we need a portable and highly accurate position sensor. We have tried getting position from a 9-DOF IMU (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer) but as you might guess, there were many problems with double integration of the noise and accelerometer bias.
So is there a device that can provide accurate position information? It should be portable and wearable (for example worn in the chest pocket, headband/cap, etc...be creative!).
EDIT (more details):
I'm going to emphasize certain aspects of this design that weren't clear before, based on people's comments:
- My current problem of position detection is due to errors in double integration of the accelerometer data. So hopefully the solution
has some incredibly powerful kalman filter (I think this is unlikely) oruses some other portable device instead of an accelerometer. - I do not need absolute position of the hand in space/on earth. I only need the hand position relative to some stable point on the body, such as the chest or belly. So maybe there can be a device on the hand that can measure position relative to a wearable device on the body. I don't know if such technology exists; I guess it'd use either magnets, ultrasound, bend sensors, or EM waves of some sort. Be creative :)