A New Wearable Input Device: SCURRY

Abstract

A new wearable input device named SCURRY, developed by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, is introduced in this paper. Based on inertial sensors, this device allows a human operator to select a specified character, an event, or an operation as the input he/she wants spatially through both hand motion and finger clicking. It is a glovelike device, which can be worn on the human hand, composed of a base module, including one controller and two angular-velocity sensors (gyroscopes) on the back of the hand, and four ring-type modules (rings), including two-axis acceleration sensors (accelerometers) on four fingers. The base and the ring modules are integrated modules containing sensors, a transceiver or receiver for communication, and a microcontroller, which makes the device compact and light. The two gyroscopes embedded in the base module have a role in detecting the direction (up, down, right, and left) of the hand motion, and the accelerometers have a role in detecting finger motion generated by finger clicking. An algorithm for the exact finger-click recognition composed of three parts (feature extraction, valid-click discrimination, and crosstalk avoidance) is proposed to improve the recognition performance of finger clicking on SCURRY. The experimental results and discussions are presented. SCURRY can be used as a wearable mouse spatially, by allowing any three fingers to be operated as the left, middle, and right mouse buttons, and in a similar manner, as a wearable keyboard, as it allows a human operator to point and select any character, event, or operation by his hand motion and finger clicking.