Triboelectric Bending Sensors for AI-Enabled Sign Language Recognition.

Journal: Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany)
PMID:

Abstract

Human-machine interfaces and wearable electronics, as fundamentals to achieve human-machine interactions, are becoming increasingly essential in the era of the Internet of Things. However, contemporary wearable sensors based on resistive and capacitive mechanisms demand an external power, impeding them from extensive and diverse deployment. Herein, a smart wearable system is developed encompassing five arch-structured self-powered triboelectric sensors, a five-channel data acquisition unit to collect finger bending signals, and an artificial intelligence (AI) methodology, specifically a long short-term memory (LSTM) network, to recognize signal patterns. A slider-crank mechanism that precisely controls the bending angle is designed to quantitively assess the sensor's performance. Thirty signal patterns of sign language of each letter are collected and analyzed after the environment noise and cross-talks among different channels are reduced and removed, respectively, by leveraging low pass filters. Two LSTM models are trained using different training sets, and four indexes are introduced to evaluate their performance, achieving a recognition accuracy of 96.15%. This work demonstrates a novel integration of triboelectric sensors with AI for sign language recognition, paving a new application avenue of triboelectric sensors in wearable electronics.

Authors

  • Wei Wang
    State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine, Institute of Chinese Medical Sciences, University of Macau, Macau 999078, China.
  • Xiangkun Bo
    Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
  • Weilu Li
    Institutes of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China.
  • Abdelrahman B M Eldaly
    Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
  • Lingyun Wang
    Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China. wangly@xmu.edu.cn.
  • Wen Jung Li
    Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
  • Leanne Lai Hang Chan
    Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
  • Walid A Daoud
    Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.