FingerTrak wearable captures human hands in 3D

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Sign language translation or spotting the early signs of Alzheimer's could be helped with FingerTrak, a wrist-mounted device that continuously tracks the entire human hand in 3D.

This is the claim of researchers from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison who said FingerTrak can sense and translate into 3D the many positions of the human hand, including 20 finger joint positions, using three or four miniature, low-resolution thermal cameras that read contours on the wrist.

According to the team, the device could be used in virtual reality, mobile health, human-robot interaction and other areas. Their findings are published in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.

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"This was a major discovery by our team - that by looking at your wrist contours, the technology could reconstruct in 3D, with keen accuracy, where your fingers are," said Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science and director of Cornell's new SciFi Lab, where FingerTrak was developed. "It's the first system to reconstruct your full hand posture based on the contours of the wrist."

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