Edwin Tan

Smart gloves: Hand Gesture Interaction with your bikes

Sensor embedded gloves and wearable devices have been widely researched to enhance the human computer interaction, like 3D modeling and virtual reality, and mobile interaction, like data tracking and navigation. In order to improve cycling experience and address the safety issue, we proposed a smart gloves equipped with bending sensors and IMU sensors, which enable cyclists to control electronic components on the bike/e-bike , such as gear shifting, motor speed, adjusting suspension system, saddle height and lighting. The device could greatly integrate the control of different function to gloves and 

As more and more commercialized components have been developed and assembled to bicycle, the bike handle bars are mounted with different control modules, which require cyclists to pay more attention to the settings, mode selection, adjustment, shifting and twisting. On the one hand, those control module will distract users from riding. On the other hand, some of them even require cyclists to move their hands off hand gripper, which is very inconvenient and unsafe for cycling. 

While gloves-based controller and sensors system have been widely studied as an input device to 3D modeling, mobile device, multimedia, gaming and robotics control, relatively little research has focused on its application on sports and transportation. For example, in the setting of using e-bikes and scooters, people have very limited freedom and scale in hand movement or gesture. Moreover, the application need to take mobility, data transmission and power consumption into consideration and involve different aspects of human factor in design. 

Key Challenges:

The key challenges for this project would be preventing abrupt finger movement or hand movement while interpreting the gesture and excecuting the control commands.

Gloves Hardware Design:

The system includes three modules: gloves, smart phone and bike controller. The hardware includes RFduino microcontroller (ARM Cortex M0, clock speed 16MHz),MPU6050 (IMU), flex bending sensors,force sensitive resistors and micro vibration motor(3V). The communication between IMU sensor and microcontroller is based on I2C protocol.

The gloves is designed to have a dual-processors system, which is equipped with two RFduino microcontrollers. One of them is talking to smart phone via Bluetooth, while reading and analyzing the sensor data from IMU. The other module is wirelessly communicating with Bike controller through GZLL protocol, while taking the data from bending flex sensors, pressure sensors and controlling micro motors. The communication between these two modules is based on TX/RX serial communication. The reason of using two microcontrollers is that it can optimize software structure by having two independent data buffer functions and increase processing speed by having dual computing modules. 

PCB Design:

In order to make the glove design robust, I designed and developed the first version of PCB layout. The sketch is not designed for surface mounted but just a very preliminary testing board, which will be used to test the software. 

The PCB was designed to have interface for plugging in two RFduino microcontrollers.

J1, J2, J3, J4 headers are designed to interface the pressure sensors.

R4, R5 headers are designed to interface flex sensors. 

User interface:

The simple smart phone application has been developed to help users better interact with the gloves and their bikes. Users are able to view available electronic components on the bike and choose to connect them with glove. Then it will allow user to match gestures with the connecting components based on their preference. The interface will also display cycling data like speed, gear ratio, suspension status, depending on the which sensors are connecting with the bike controller. The application is built based on iOS 9.0 platform and designed using xCode SDK.