VISVESVARAYA TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY

JNANA SANGAMA, BELAGAVI - 590018

A Technical seminar(17ECS86) report

on
“INTELLIGENT MEDI-GLOVE”
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT FOR THE REQUIREMENT
OF
BACHELOR OF ENGINEERING
IN
ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

SUBMITTED BY
CHETHAN KUMAR L [USN: 1AH17EC013]

UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF

Mrs. Vijaya Dalawai
Assistant Professor,
Department of ECE, ACSCE, Bangalore

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

ACS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
KAMBIPURA, MYSORE ROAD, BENGALURU – 560074
2020-2021

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 ACS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
KAMBIPURA, MYSORE ROAD, BENGALURU – 560074

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS &

COMMUNICATIONENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the topic of technical seminar(15ECS86), entitled "INTELLIGET
MEDI-GLOVE" is a bonafide work carried out by CHETHAN KUMAR L BEARING
USN 1AH17EC013, under the supervision od Mrs. Vijaya Dalawai, Associate Professor,
Department of Electronics and communication, ACS College of Engineering, Bangalore
in partial fulfillment for the award of Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and
Communication Engineering of the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belagavi
during the academic year 2020-21. It is certified that corrections/suggestions indicated by
internal assessment have been incorporated in the report deposited in the departmental
library. The Technical seminar report has been approved as it satisfies the academic
requirements in respect of seminar work prescribed for the said degree.

Mrs. Vijaya Dalawai Dr. H. B. Bhuvaneswari Dr. M. S. Murali

Internal Guide HOD, ECE Principal

Name of the Examiners Signature with Date

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude towards the institute,
ACS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING for forwarding my internship letter to Cleverebit
Solutions Pvt Ltd, Bangalore.

I would like to express my profound thanks to Dr. A.C. Shanmugam, Chairman,

ACS College of Engineering.

I would like to acknowledge my sincere regards to Dr. M. S. Murali, Principal,

ACS College of Engineering.

I would like to express my profound gratitude to Dr. H. B. Bhuvaneswari, Head

of department, Electronics and Communication Engineering, ACS College of
Engineering, for his consistent motivation and encouragement.

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my internal guide, Mrs. Vijaya

Dalawai Associate Professor, Electronics and Communication Department, ACS College
of Engineering, for his encouragement and valuable guidance throughout my Seminar
work.

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the internship coordinator

Mr. Harish. L Associate Professor, Electronics and Communication Department, ACS
College of Engineering, for his encouragement and valuable guidance throughout my
Seminar Work.
I take this opportunity to thank all my friends, classmates who always stood by
me in difficult situation and also helped me in technical aspects and last but not least I
wish to express sense of gratitude to my parents who were a constant source of
encouragement and stood by me as a pillar of strength for completing this work
successfully.

CHETHAN KUMAR L

USN: 1AH17EC013

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INTELLIGENT MEDI-GLOVE 2020-2021

ABSTRACT

According to World Health Organization, the number of elderly people will rise rapidly
between 2015 and 2050. Rates of physical disability or mobility problems are increasing due
to population aging. With the continuous evolution of robotic technology, assistive robot shows
great prospect to expand the existing healthcare services to address the above problems. As a
result, nursing-care robotic systems are playing more and more important role to the elderly
and disabled. In this paper, a sensor glove which is employed for human-robot interaction in
an assistive robotic system is designed, produced, and evaluated. . The sensor glove is based
on flex sensors which are utilized to detect user’s finger gestures and inertial measurement unit
(IMU) which is used to detect arm movements of the user and other off-the-shelf electronic
components. The main goal of this research is to make the interaction between human and
assistive robots more intuitive and reliable. This paper mainly deals with three issues:
1) Inventing a design pattern of this kind of sensor gloves
2) Performance evaluation of sensor gloves based on flex sensors, and
3) Method of analysing the human-in-the-loop system with the presence of the sensor glove.
The sensor glove can be a reliable interface in controlling the assistive robotic system.
Besides, the estimation model can be used in analysing this human-in-the-loop assistive
robotic system and able to find suitable parameters of this system theoretically.

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INDEX

CHAPTER NO. CONTENTS PAGE NO.

Abstract

Chapter 1 Introduction 7

8
Chapter 2 Literature survey
Methodology 14

Chapter 3 3.1 Finger bend detection

3.2 Arm movement
detection
Circuit architecture of Sensor 17
Chapter 4 Glove
Performance Evaluation Index 20
Chapter 5
Experiments of integrated 23
Chapter 6 systems

Chapter 7 Experiment Setup 24

Advantages, disadvantages, 26
Chapter 8 and applications

27
Chapter 9 Results and discussions

Conclusion and future scope 29

Chapter 10

30
Chapter 11 Bibliography

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LIST OF FIGURES

PAGE NO. CONTENTS PAGE NO.

A) Finger bent detection using flex sensor. 16

1 B) Arm bent detection using inertial sensor.

2 Flex sensor 17

3 Inertial measurement unit 17

4 9V zinc manganese dry battery 17
5 Bluetooth unit (HC06) 18
6 Arduino Mega (microcontroller) 18
Gesture models of the user’s fingers and arm. Information 19
7 and control flow of the robotics system. Robotic system
diagrammatic sketch and circuit architecture of circuit
glove.
A)Resistance of Flex sensor corresponding to thumb, Index 20
finger, middle finger, little finger when making bent or
8 straight gestures periodically.
B)Resistance of Flex sensor corresponding to ring finger
when making bent or straight gestures periodically for 1000
times and measuring static state resistance every 10
periods.
Correspondence between true resistance of Flex sensors 22
9 and output voltage.

A) Process with stopping distance by human and robotic 23

10 system.
B) Control loop wiwi sensor glove.
C) Human factor and robotic system.
11 Assistive robot 25

A)Human factor under different angular velocities. 28

12 B)Success rate predicted is very close to experimental
value.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION
Rates of physical disability or mobility problems are increasing due to population aging. With
the continuous evolution of robotic technology, assistive robot thus shows great prospect to
expand the existing healthcare services to address the above problems. Human-robot interface
based on gestures provides an intuitive and easy way for users to control assistive robots
remotely. Approaches to realize gesture-based interface can be classified into three main
categories: image-based approaches, glove-based interface, and non-wearable approaches. The
resolution of non-wearable methods is relatively low comparing to the others. As for the image
based methods, they have been applied to control an assistant robotic system by some
researchers. However, the accuracy of image-based methods is highly dependent on lighting
conditions and surroundings. In contrast, glove-based methods do not have these constraints
and thus they are more precise and reliable in the application of homecare robot control with
the changing lighting conditions and complex surroundings in the unconstructed human
environment. Sensors that are always used in glove-based system for static finger bend
detection and dynamic arm movement detection include flex sensors and inertial sensors, which
were used in our research. Piezoresistive strain sensors (flex sensors), in concert with inertial
sensors, are utilized to make a smart glove (HandiMate), functioning as an input device of self-
configurable modular robots. Wearable sensor glove which is capable of capturing static finger
gestures and dynamic arm movements. The glove is combined with a prototype nursing-care
robotic system, which consists of an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) and an off-the-shelf
robot (YuMi). This wearable sensor glove which is capable of capturing static finger gestures
and dynamic arm movements of paralyzed patients and convey the message using Bluetooth as
medium.

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CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE SERVEY

1. A Sensor Glove for the Interaction with a Nursing-Care Assistive Robot:

Published in: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber Physical Systems
(ICPS), Date of Conference: 6-9 May 2019, Publisher: IEEE, Shimin pan, School of
Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou,China.
The main goal of this research is to make the interaction between human and assistive robots
more intuitive and reliable. This paper mainly deals with three issues: i) inventing a design
pattern of this kind of sensor gloves, ii) performance evaluation of sensor gloves based on flex
sensors, and iii) method of analyzing the human-in-the-loop system with the presence of the
sensor glove.

2. Development of a wireless glove based on RFID Sensor:

Published in: 2019 International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Electricity (ICATE),
Date of Conference: 4-6 Oct. 2019,Publisher: IEEE, Livui brenuic, Romio cristian ciobanu,
Electrical Measurements and Materials Department, “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University,
Iasi, Romania.
Sensor gloves are devices used to implement interfaces for human-machine interactions which
are utilized in a wide range of applications such as control of embedded systems, translation of
sign language, gestures recognition, medical rehabilitation etc. This paper presents a wireless
sensor glove based on the use of RFID sensors. For this type of sensors, the energy supplied
for measurement and for the communication of measured data back to the reader is provided
exclusively by the reader via the electromagnetic field. Therefore, it was important for the
device to be designed so that the power consumption be minimal. For this reason, our sensor
glove is designed using devices capable of harvesting the electromagnetic energy from the
reader, monitor this energy and consume it only when needed by using a microcontroller which
features several very low power consumption modes.

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3. A Hybrid, Wearable Exoskeleton Glove Equipped with Variable Stiffness Joints,

Abduction Capabilities, and a Telescopic Thumb:

LUCAS GEREZ , (Graduate Student Member, IEEE), GENG GAO , (Graduate Student
Member, IEEE), ANANY DWIVEDI , (Graduate Student Member, IEEE), AND MINAS
LIAROKAPIS , (Senior Member, IEEE), ,date of publication September21,2020,date of
current version October1,2020
Robotic hand exoskeletons have become a popular and efficient technological solution for
assisting people that suffer from neurological conditions and for enhancing the capabilities of
healthy individuals. This class of devices ranges from rigid and complex structures to soft, light
weight, wearable gloves. In this work, we propose a hybrid (tendon-driven and pneumatic),
lightweight, affordable, easy-to-operate exoskeleton glove equipped with variable stiffness,
laminar jamming structures, abduction/adduction capabilities, and a pneumatic telescopic extra
thumb that increases grasp stability.
The efficiency of the proposed device is experimentally validated through five different types
of experiments: i) abduction/adduction tests, ii) force exertion experiments that capture the
forces that can be exerted by the proposed device under different conditions, iii) bending profile
experiments that evaluate the effect of the laminar jamming structures on the way the fingers
bend, iv) grasp quality assessment experiments that focus on the effect of the inflatable thumb
on enhancing grasp stability, and v) grasping experiments involving everyday objects and
seven subjects. The hybrid assistive, exoskeleton glove considerably improves the grasping
capabilities of the user, being able to exert the forces required to execute a plethora of activities
of daily living. All files that allow the replication of the device are distributed in an open-source
manner.

4. Smart Gloves for Hand Gesture Recognition:

Published in: 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian
Applications (RAHA), Publisher: IEEE,K Abhijith Bhaskaran; Anoop G. Nair; K Deepak Ram;
Krishnan Ananthanarayanan; H.R. Nandi Vardhan .
People with speech impairment find it difficult to communicate in a society where most of the

people do not understand sign language. The idea proposed in this paper is a smart glove which

can convert sign language to speech output. The glove is embedded with flex sensors and an

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Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to recognize the gesture. A novel method of State Estimation

has been developed to track the motion of hand in three dimensional spaces.

The prototype was tested for its feasibility in converting Indian Sign Language to voice output.

Though the glove is intended for sign language to speech conversion, it is a multipurpose glove

and finds its applications in gaming, robotics and medical field.

5. Image processing and feature extraction techniques:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092031526X
Understanding sign language is an arduous task and it is a skill that has to be learned with
practice. But with this paper, we aim to provide several schemes of identifying and
understanding such letters without learning the sign language. We focus primarily on the
development of new procedures to understand sign language, and to find differences between
the approaches and best method of recognition of the sign language. There are several
difficulties in developing a better method for sign recognition such as, in real life the images
captured are so Available online

6. Gesture control robotic arm using flex sensors:

,Waseem Afzal, Shamas Iqbal, Zanib Tahira, Mehtab Ejaz Qureshi of Electrical engineering,
Comsat institute of information technology Gesture Control Robotic Arm Using Flex Sensor.
Applied and Computational Mathematics. Vol. 6, No. 4, 2017, pp. 171-176. doi:
10.11648/j.acm.20170604.12

The design and implementation of a gesture control robotic arm using flex sensor is proposed.
The robotic arm is designed in such a way that it consists of four movable fingers, each with
three linkages, an opposing thumb, a rotating wrist and an elbow. The robotic arm is made to
imitate the human hand movements using a hand glove. The hand glove consists 5 flex sensors
for controlling the finger movements and an Accelerometer for the wrist and elbow movements.
The actuator used for the robotic arm are servo motors. The finger movements are controlled
using cables that act like the tendons of human arm. The robotic arm is controlled from a distant

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location using a wireless module. A prototype of the robotic arm was constructed and tested
for various hand movements.
The design and implementation of a gesture control robotic arm using flex sensor is proposed.
The robotic arm is designed in such a way that it consists of four movable fingers, each with
three linkages, an opposing thumb, a rotating wrist and an elbow. The robotic arm is made to
imitate the human hand movements using a hand glove. The hand glove consists 5 flex sensor
for controlling the finger movements and an Accelerometer for the wrist and elbow movements.
The actuators used for the robotic arm are servo motors. The finger movements are controlled
using cables that act like the tendons of human arm. The robotic arm is controlled from distant
location using a wireless module. A prototype of the robotic arm was constructed and tested
for various hand movements. The design and implementation of a gesture control robotic arm
using flex sensor is proposed. The robotic arm is designed in such a way that it consists of four
movable fingers, each with three linkages, an opposing thumb, a rotating wrist and an elbow.
The robotic arm is made to imitate the human hand movements using a hand glove. The hand
glove consists 5 flex sensors for controlling the finger movements and an Accelerometer for
the wrist and elbow movements. The actuators used for the robotic arm are servo motors. The
finger movements are controlled using cables that act like the tendons of human arm. The
robotic arm is controlled from a distant location using a wireless module. A prototype of the
robotic arm was constructed and tested for various hand movements. The design and
implementation of a gesture control robotic arm using flex sensor is proposed. The robotic arm
is designed in such a way that it consists of four movable fingers, each with three linkages, an
opposing thumb, a rotating wrist, and an elbow. The robotic arm is made to imitate then human
hand movements using a hand glove. The hand glove consists of 5 flex sensors for controlling
the finger movements and an Accelerometer for the wrist and elbow movements. The actuators
used for the robotic arm are servo motors. The finger movements are controlled using cables
that act like the tendons of human arm. The robotic arm is controlled from a distant location
using a wireless module. A prototype of the robotic arm was constructed and tested for various
hand movement batteries as required for wireless system.

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7. ACO Assistive Robotic Device: Empowering People with disabilities

through innovative algorithms:

July 2019, Conference: Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of

NorthAmerica (RESNA). Campeu-Lecours, Mahea, V. Lepage, Lamontagne.H. JACO
Assistive Robitic Device: Empowering people with disabilities through innovative algorithms.
Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology society of North America (RESNA)
Annual conference July 2019. Campeau-Lecours, A., Maheu, V., Lepage, S., Lamontagne, H.,
Latour, S., Paquet, L., Hardie, N. (2016). JACO Assistive Robotic Device: Empowering People
with Disabilities Through Innovative Algorithms. Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive
Technology Society of North America (RESNA) Annual Conference. July 2016, Washington
DC JACO is a commercially available robotic assistive device designed to help people with
upper body disabilities gaining more autonomy in their daily life. The device consists of an arm
and hand (gripper) mounted on a power wheelchair. This assistance is possible through basic
functions such as tri-dimensional displacement of the gripper in space, finger opening and
closing and orientation of the wrist. Although these basic functionalities allow the user to
perform many tasks, advanced functionalities were required to further empower the users. This
paper presents advanced functionalities that were implemented in JACO in order to increase
the users’ safety and to enhance their autonomy by increasing the number of achievable tasks
and diminishing the time and effort needed to achieve them.

8. Textile-Based Stretchable and Flexible Glove Sensor for Monitoring Upper

Extremity Prosthesis Functions:

Jas Sang Heo1, Hossein Hamidi Shishavan1, Rahim Soleymanpour1, Jiwon Kim2, and Insoo
Kim1, Published in: IEEE Sensors Journal ( Volume: 20, Issue: 4, Feb.15, 15 2020), Publisher:
IEEE, Date of Publication: 23 October 2019.
To detect various signals and motions from the human body, textile substrates having the
compatibility with human skin and high electrical/mechanical properties are strongly required
in wearable healthcare sensors. However, there is still limitations in forming electrical materials
directly on fabric substrates due to inherent fabric properties such as porousness and roughness
of surface. In this study, by using stretchable and flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) films
as both interface/ planarization and passivation layers, we demonstrate a textile based AgNW

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sensor with high conductivity (434.7 S/cm) on polyester-based spandex fabric substrate. In
addition, in order to detect hand motions, we designed a full-sized glove-type sensor by
integrating five strain sensor units, showing stable responsibility to each finger motions
individually. Furthermore, to expand the possibilities of the textile-based glove sensor in
prosthesis monitoring applications, the glove sensor was applied to a 3Dprinted prosthetic hand
to detect hand motion or gestures and showed stable corresponding responses to different
grasps (against normal and small-sized balls). From successful results in practical 3D-printed
prosthetic application, we believe that the textile-based sensor developed in this study is
appropriate for human motion monitoring and potential candidates for integrated prosthetic
hands and medical robotic hand.

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CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

The glove is combined with a prototype nursing-care robotic system, which consists of an
Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) and an off-the-shelf robot (YuMi). A nursing-care assistive
robotic system consists of two subsystems—a YuMi robot is mounted on an AGV. YuMi is
used for manipulation and is designed for helping people with upper limb disability. The AGV
is used for movement, which is an essential functionality to people with lower limb disability.
The glove can translate eight finger signs into AGV movement commands and mode switch
commands. It can also detect 3-dimensional movements of user’s arm and convert them into
commands for YuMi manipulation and they are as follows:
The sensor glove can detect the gestures of user’s metacarpophalangeal joints (bent or straight)
through flex sensors, which are embedded into the glove at the corresponding position.
Meanwhile, the movement of user’s arm is also detected by the inertial measurement unit
(IMU), which is attached to the wristband. The voltage signals are sent into a microcontroller.
Using the methods of threshold judgment and decision tree classification, the gesture of fingers
and arms are recognized and are classified into predefined models (8 models of finger gestures
and 3 models of arm movements).
Send the corresponding commands to a control board of assistive robotic system via Bluetooth.
HC06 is chosen for its suitable size, data rate and price for the glove system. Then, according
to the mode of the system (switch back and forth by mode switch commands), AGV or YuMi
will act correspondingly.

Finger Bend Detection Subsystem:

As for the part of finger gesture recognition, when a certain gesture is made, the resistance of
flex sensors embedded at the back of corresponding fingers will change, due to the
resistancestrain effect. Then a bleeder resistor with known value and an analog to digit
converter are used to measure the voltage. The next step is to calculate the resistor of flex
sensors through Kirchhoff laws. Consequently, with the “angle-resistance” curve measured in
advance, the gesture of fingers (angle of metatarsophalangeal joints) can be obtained. After
that, by using the corresponding gesture table value, an AGV’s omnidirectional movement
command can be formulated and sent to assistive robotic system through Bluetooth unit.

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However, the combination of 5 fingers is less than 32, due to the constraint of human hands’
mechanical structure. In this research, only 8 of them are utilized.

Arm Movement Detection Subsystem:

The whole workflow of arm movement detection can be described as a four-stage model:
 Generating signal and transmission
 Signal segmentation, processing, feature extraction
 Classification with pretrained decision tree algorithm.
 YuMi manipulation command transmission. We use the IMU MPU6050 attached to
the wristband to detect the movements of user’s arm. MPU6050 consists of 3axis
gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer, and a Digital Motion Processor (DMP).
 It can provide complete 9-axis motion information and transmit motion data through
serial port. The data generated by IMU will be eventually sent to a personal computer
through Bluetooth and analyzed by MATLAB software.
 Then, low-pass filter with cut-off frequency being set to 35 Hz is applied to the original
signal in order to smooth it.
 The frequency range of human motion is approximately 0~20Hz and the cut-off
frequency was determined by experiments around this range.
 Then we segment the signal using sliding window method with period of 4.5 seconds,
which is one period of designed arm movement, and overlap ratio of 20% because the
movement is continuous and fluctuation is low.
 As for the feature extraction, we get the signal of yaw, pitch, roll and calculate 6 of
their properties-maximum, minimum, average, number of peaks, variance, standard
deviation-as features to be classified.
 In the process of preparatory work (training model), the features will be used in training
decision tree and we used 240 samples to do so.
 In the process of robotic controlling, the features extracted will be used in classifying
different movement of user’s arm. Finally, the command will be transmitted to robotic
control board through Bluetooth, and YuMi will act accordingly.

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Fig 1a: Finger bent detection using Fig 1b: Arm bent detection using inertial sensor
Flex sensors

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CHAPTER 4

CIRCUIT ARCHITECTURE OF THE SENSOR GLOVE

 Finger gesture recognition circuit (flex sensor) - Flex sensors are used to detect the
finger gestures

Fig 2: Flex sensor

 IMU unit (MPU6050) - It is used to detect arm movement using inertial sensor.

Fig 3: Inertial measurement unit

 9V zinc-manganese dry battery- A zinc-manganese dry battery (9 V) is attached to the

wristband for voltage supply of the overall system (Arduino Mega, Bluetooth, IMU).
Meanwhile, a voltage regulator module MC33269 (integrated in Arduino Mega) is used
to generate a relatively stable reference voltage for finger bend detection subsystem

Fig 4: 9V zinc- manganese dry battery

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o Bluetooth unit (HC06)-Use Bluetooth as the means of communication between sensor

glove and robots due to many factors. Besides, its low cost, low power profile, high
flexibility, and data rate of 1 Mbps make a good choice in this application.

Fig 5: Bluetooth unit (HC06) Bluetooth

➢ Arduino Mega (microcontroller) :
• Arduino Mega is suitable for this sensor glove application. Firstly, it has 54 general
purpose digital I/O pins. Some of the pins support serial communication, which is used
for Bluetooth in this application.
• It is equipped with sixteen 10-bit analog to digit converter for 0~5V input, which limits
the quantization error within 4.9mV.
• An ATmega2560 processor is equipped, which has a maximum clock rate of 16 MHz
In this application of detecting arm/fingers movements, classifying them into several
model and sending commands, the implementation can be achieved with this processor.
• Arduino Mega is cheap and expandable.
• Finally, it has various open-source libraries, such as serial communication library, it
helped us to develop various functionalities of the glove more efficiently

Fig 6: Arduino Mega `(microcontroller)

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Fig 7: Gesture models of the user’s fingers and arm. Information & control flow of the
robotics system. Robotic system diagrammatic sketch and below is the circuit architecture of
the sensor glove.

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CHAPTER 5
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION INDEX

The stability of the sensor glove is affected by many factors, such as fluctuation of reference
voltage, inconsistency between nominal and true value of resistor, quantization error,
individual difference and fatigue effect of flex sensors, etc. These factors can be classified into
three categories as flex sensor error, embedded system error and measurement error. Flex
sensor error can be evaluated by the experiment and will be described later. Embedded system
error and measurement error can be estimated by analyzing the specifications of electronic
components.

Fig 8 a: Resistance of flex sensors corresponding to thumb, index finger, middle finger, little
finger when making bent/straight gestures periodically
Fig 8b: Resistance of flex sensor corresponding ring finger when making bent/straight gestures
periodically for 1000 times and measuring static state resistance every 10 periods

As shown in Fig.8(a), we got the disturbance in nominal value of flex sensors’ resistance caused
by different individual properties of sensors and difference of attachment places. Interval
ranges of sensors attached to thumb, index finger, middle finger and little finger were 32~50
k:30~67 k:34~75 k:25~57 k:respectively. In this research, we only care about two states of

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fingers: completely straight and bent. So, only resistance in these two static states are measured
and utilized. Fig.8(b) shows the disturbance in nominal resistance value of the flex sensor
attached to ring finger, which is caused mainly by transition process of the system
(overshooting and undershooting effects), finger gesture uncertainty and fatigue of the flex
sensor. Namely the value of resistance changed rapidly within the first few seconds of transition
stage, and in the meantime, the resistance varies greatly from one period to another. However,
the fatigue effect with 1000 times of shape changes is relatively small comparing to the
transition effect and gesture uncertainty effect. Finally, as a result of this measurement, the
resistance range of the flex sensor attached to the ring finger was 27~45 k

A block diagram of bend detection subsystem

Equation describes the way we get the nominal output voltage, which can be used to judge the
posture of fingers later. It can be obtained by Kirchhoff’s voltage law. However, it’s not a
standard formula of Kirchhoff’s laws because of various errors and disturbances in the process
of measuring, such as the differences between nominal and true values of reference resistor and
reference voltage. Namely there is disturbance in the output voltage and this will narrow the
range of threshold value, as shown in image below, because we need to make sure that
disturbance of flex sensors and other electronic components will not cause confusion of finger
gestures.

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Fig 9: Correspondence between true resistance of flex sensors and output voltage when taking
electronic system uncertainty into consideration. Meanwhile, the effects of sensor individual
difference and sensor fatigue were reflected by the disturbance of true resistance value of flex
sensors.
A performance evaluation index is introduced in this section, which can characterize the sensor
performance when combined with other specific electronic components. Meanwhile, in concert
with slight adjustment through experiment, an optimal threshold value of a flex sensor can also
be found. The above image shows that there is an upper bound and a lower bound of output
voltage corresponding to a true resistance value, which means nominal value of an electronic
components are not identical to their true value because of the reference voltage and resistance
uncertainty. In the meantime, the factors of sensor individual difference and sensor fatigue
affect the true resistance value of flex sensors, which result in disturbance at horizontal axis. In
order not to misjudge the states of finger gestures, the appropriate threshold should fall into the
range defined in the image.
So, the performance evaluation index could be the length of the range. If the range is larger, we
are less likely to mistake bent state for straight state. In contrast, if the range is smaller, or
negative in extreme conditions, the chance of confusion will be large. This can be caused by
various factors, such as sensor individual difference, sensor fatigue, electronic system
uncertainty, etc. Some pre-calibrated methods may improve the performance of motion capture
gloves, such as simple linear method, linear regression, and methods for coupling problems.
However, in this research, it is not necessary because: Firstly, only resistance in completely
bent and straight states rather than the correspondence between resistance and bend degree
were considered. Also, the success rate is high enough to control the robotic system.

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CHAPTER 6

EXPERIMENTS OF INTEGRATED SYSTEM

Fig 10a: A diagrammatic sketch of stopping process with stopping distance (angle) introduced
by human (Θa) and robotic system (θstop).

Fig 10b: A diagram of control loop wiwi sensor glove (human factor) in it.

Fig 10c: Human factor and robotic system (Gaussian distribution) model of total stopping
distance θv at certain velocity parameter.

In the category of Human Machine Interface (HMI), human factor should be introduced in the
control loop. The user wearing the sensor glove introduces uncertain human factors into this
assistive robotic system, which makes it hard to analyze the whole system. In this section, we
are trying to establish a model for analyzing and predicting this human-in-the-loop system. The
purpose of establishing the model is to get optimal parameters of the nursing-care robotic
system, such as angle velocity and acceleration, in everyday application scenarios.
The application scenario of this assistive robotic system the in-home care for the elderly, where
spaces are usually confined. As a result, both accuracy and efficiency should be taken into
consideration, which means we have to find a balanced point between the two. We hope to get
the parameters in a theoretical approach, which can be applied to different robotic system with
the presence of the sensor glove and is more universal than experimental approach. In this
section of experiment, we focused on the process of turning the robot to the expected direction
when using the designed sensor glove. The diagrammatic sketch of this process is shown in
Fig.10.

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CHAPTER 7

EXPERIMENT SETUP

The main evaluation criteria of this experiment were success rate of sending proper commands
according to the gesture of user’s fingers and arm, as well as the success rate of controlling the
robotic system to stop at desired direction. The experiment was divided into two stages: Firstly,
a subject wearing the sensor glove made different gestures randomly according to the gesture
table shown in result and the success and fail cases (success rate) were recorded. Secondly, as
shown in Fig. 11, the length L of a passage is 1.5 meters, and the width M is 0.9 meter. The
angle between the original direction of this AGV and the passage is about 45 degrees. Under
different values of angular velocity, the subject used the sensor glove to adjust the direction of
the robotic system to a desired place (only the command of Turn Left/Right are used). The
angular velocity was predefined for each experiment and was not influenced by the joint angle.
The success and failure cases (success rate) were recorded. The success cases are those whose
value of stopping angle θV is small enough so that no further adjustment is needed in order for
the robots to pass through the passage. In this experiment, calculating from the overall
dimension of the robot and the passage, the limitation of stopping angle is set to −4 degrees to
4 degrees. For every different parameter of angular velocity (10 rad/s, 20 rad/s, 30 rad/s), we
recorded 100 set of data of stopping angle θv, respectively. Half of the data were used in
parameter estimation for the human factor (Gaussian distribution) models. Another half of the
data were used to validate the proposed model by comparing the success rate predicted by the
model and the one recorded.

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Fig 11: Assistive robot rotates in the passage with length of 1.5meters and width of 0.9meter.
The rotating angle is measured by a protractor printed on a paper.

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CHAPTER 8
ADVANTAGES, DISADVANTAGES AND APPLICATIONS

ADVANTAGES:
 Enabling patients and caregivers to interact thereby reducing the frequency of personal
visits
 Assisting people with domestic tasks- many give up independent living because of
arthritis.
 Accuracy: the information will be transferred quick and efficient  Expanding the
healthcare services.

DISADVANTAGES:
 Cost: Like anything else, with good comes bad, it isn’t affordable by everybody.
 Comparison with human: debate to this topic is the fact that many people feel a robot
will never compare to a human.

APPLICATIONS:

 Sign language understanding

 Health care services  Virtual reality

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CHAPTER 9

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

First Stage: Sensor Glove

Using the performance evaluation index method, we set the threshold as the optimal value (the
threshold values were initially set to the middle of the range obtained in the graph
corresponding between true resistance of flex sensors and output voltage and adjusted slightly
through experiment). The final threshold values of all the five fingers are shown in the graph
corresponding between true resistance of flex sensors and output voltage. The results of success
rate for different gestures are shown in the TABLE below.

As the result shows above, using the optimal threshold, the sensor glove proves to be reliable
to reflect user’s intention accurately. That validates the method of selecting optimal threshold.

Second Stage: Integrated System Under different command of input velocity values vk, we got
a series of angular error between actual stopping direction and desired direction. The series is
denoted as θvi. In order to obtain the reasonable value of unknown parameters of the Gaussian
distribution (human factor), the maximum likelihood estimator is employed. It is a method to
choose parameters of a distribution that provide largest value of the likelihood function,

Using the equation to estimate the gaussian distribution with unknown mean μ and square of
variance σ2,

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INTELLIGENT MEDI-GLOVE 2020-2021

Using Fig 12a: shows the models of human factor under different angular velocities. It
conforms to intuition because as the velocity increases, it will be harder for a user to direct the
robot at the expected direction, which means the degree of scatter will eventually increase
accordingly. Besides, stopping distance θstop introduced by robotic system increases, which is
reflected by the mean of the distribution.

Fig.12b: shows that the success rate predicted by the proposed model is very close to
experimental measurement, which validates the model. However, the result can be further
improved by introducing subjects with different ages, genders, health conditions, etc.

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CHAPTER 10

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

The paper presents a design pattern of a sensor glove consisting of finger gesture detention and
arm movement detention subsystem. The glove was integrated with a nursing-care robotic
system. The glove that was fabricated and evaluated in thus paper proved to be reliable to reflect
user’s intention to control the assistive robots. In the aspect of evaluation of whole integrated
system, the model we proposed to analyse the human-in-the-loop system was validated by the
experimental result and can predict success rate of controlling the robot desired position quite
accurately.

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CHAPTER 11

REFERENCES

 A Sensor Glove for the Interaction with a Nursing-Care Assistive Robot

Published in: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber Physical
Systems (ICPS), Date of Conference: 6-9 May 2019, Publisher: IEEE, Shimin pan,
School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou,China.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8780354

 Textile-Based Stretchable and Flexible Glove Sensor for Monitoring Upper Extremity
Prosthesis Functions.
Published in: IEEE Sensors Journal ( Volume: 20, Issue: 4, Feb.15, 15 2020), Date of
Publication: 23 October 2019,Publisher: IEEE
Jas Sang Heo1, Hossein Hamidi Shishavan1, Rahim Soleymanpour1, Jiwon Kim2, and
Insoo Kim1. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8880689

 Development of a wireless glove based on RFID sensor Published in: 2019

International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Electricity (ICATE), Date of
Conference: 4-6 Oct. 2019,Publisher: IEEE Livui brenuic, Romio cristian ciobanu,
Electrical Measurements and Materials Department, “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical
University, Iasi, Romania. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8551392

 Functioning of flex sensors and inertial sensors.

https://components101.com/sensors/flex-sensor-working-circuit-datasheet.
http://www.kostasalexis.com/inertial-sensors.html

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