Digital Data Entry Glove (1983)
Digital Data Entry Glove, Dr. G. Grimes
- first glove-like device (cloth) onto which numerous touch, bend, and inertial sensors were sewn.
- measured finger flexure, hand-orientation and wrist-position, and had tactile sensors at fingertips.
- orientation of hand tracked by video camera; required clear line-of-sight observation for the glove to function.
- designed as alternative to keyboard; matched recognized gestures/hand orientations to specific characters, specifically to recognize the Single Hand Manual Alphabet for the American Deaf; circuitry hard-wired to recognize 80 unique combinations of sensor readings to output a subset of the 96 printable ASCII characters; a tool to “finger-spell” words.
- finger flex sensors, tactile sensors at the fingertips, orientation sensing and wrist-positioning sensors; positions of sensors were changeable.
- US Patent 4,414,537 Patented Nov. 8, 1983 'Digital data entry glove Gary J. Grimes, Bell Telephone Lab. Inc interface device' .