Design of Custom-fit Seamless Gloves as a Motion Sensing Platform

摘要

This paper introduces a custom-fit glove design for the hand motion sensor platform using a digital knitting process. The digital knitting system enables embedding programmable sensor pattern with conductive yarn at the finger joints as well as adjusting the hand dimension and shape for wear comfort. As the initial design process, it is crucial to measure the accurate and efficient wearers' hand dimensions and characteristics. The customized glove is developed using SDS-One apex CAD software, which allows determining the design selection in size and shape, materials selection with loop density, and various pattern design on the glove surface. Therefore, we utilize a 3D scanned hand measurement~([1]) as input parameters of the digital knitting system and investigate the differences between the real hand size and the dimension of the prototyped gloves developed by the digital knitting machine. The analysis results show that the dimensional difference between the hand measurement and the size of the prototyped glove indicates only 0.3% and 1.5% in a vertical and horizontal direction, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of elastomer filament and nylon is selected for the conformal skin contact to detect the small movement accurately, and for the sensor pattern, the silver-plated nylon filaments with elastomer filament are used. The individual sensor patterns are placed on the flexion at the distal interphalangeal joint (DIP), proximal interphalangeal joint (PIP), interphalangeal joint (IP), and metacarpophalangeal joint (MCP) on the customized location of five fingers. The linearity and repeatability of the sensor unit on the knitted glove system have proved in a various range of size in length and width. With further optimization, custom smart gloves embedding sensor patterns have realized the movement detection at the joint of a human finger, which has great application prospects in future wearable human-machine interaction systems.