Development of a Wearable Gesture Recognition System Based on Two-Terminal Electrical Impedance Tomography

This paper proposes a low-cost, wearable gesture recognition system based on the two-terminal electrical impedance tomography (EIT) technique. The system includes a wearable EIT sensor of eight electrodes, a hardware device, and gesture recognition software running on a PC. Nine different gestures can be stably identified from the measured impedance changes through machine learning algorithms. Experimental results show that the Quadric Discriminator algorithm has the highest recognition rate of 98.49% for the filtered validation set. Besides, the recognition results in the two-terminal mode and transformed four-terminal mode are compared by applying a two-to-four-terminal mapping to the two-terminal EIT system, and the recognition rate decreases with the most classification models in the latter mode. Thus, it is supposed that contact impedance plays an important role in gesture recognition. By analyzing the data characteristics with variance inflation factor (VIF) test and principal component analysis (PCA), the supposition is explained and verified, proving the merit of a two-terminal EIT system in gesture recognition.