Sensor network architecture to measure characteristics of a handshake between humans

Handshaking is an important component of social interaction between people in many cultures. Thus, for further applications in human/humanoid-robot interaction it is important to understand and measure the characteristics of a handshake during interaction between humans. In this paper, a new wearable sensor network to measure a handshake is described. It consists of a set of several sensors (accelerometers, gyroscopes and force sensors) attached to the glove, and of a microcontroller for signal acquisition and conditioning. The paper focuses on the applicability and qualitative analysis of the proposed architecture of sensors through several experiments of handshaking between two human subjects. The results show that the proposed system allows reproducible experiments to quantify handshake characteristics such as duration and strength of the grip, vigor and rhythmicity of a handshake.