Design and validation of a multi-finger sensing device based on Optical linear encoder

This paper presents the design and validation of a wearable glove-based multi-finger motion capture device (SmartGlove) with a specific focus on the development of a new optical linear encoder (OLE). The OLE specially designed for this project has a compact size, light weight and low power consumption. The characterization tests also show that the OLE´s digital output has good linearity and accuracy. The first prototype of SmartGlove which uses ten OLEs to capture the flexion/extension motion of the 14 finger joints is constructed based on the multi-point sensing method. A user study for the evaluation of SmartGlove using a standard protocol shows high repeatability and reliability in both the gripped and flat hand positions compared with four other evaluated data gloves using the same protocol.