User-dependent gesture recognition on android handheld devices

Nowadays, many mobile devices are equipped with built-in inertial sensors. This spurred the research on new forms of communication between man and machines based on the movements or “gestures” performed by the user when holding the device. Here we discuss a gesture recognition system for controlling mobile devices with a wide range of possible practical applications. The system was designed to run in realtime on a resource-constrained platform and therefore has a low computational complexity. The paper describes a GestWiz user application for Android operating system which uses the data from a single triaxial accelerometer to recognize a collection of 9 different hand gestures. The system´s performance was evaluated off-line, using a gesture dataset, and on-line, through the series of user tests with the application being executed on a smartphone.