Personalized Hand Pose and Gesture Recognition System for the Elderly

Elderly population is growing all over the globe. Novel human-computer interaction systems and techniques are required to fill the gap between elderly reduced physical and cognitive capabilities and the smooth usage of technological artefacts densely populating our environments. Gesture-based interfaces are potentially more natural, intuitive, and direct. In this paper, we propose a personalized hand pose and gesture recognition system (called HANDY) supporting personalized gestures and we report the results of two experiments with both younger and older participants. Our results show that by sufficiently training our system we can get similar accuracies for both younger and older users. This means that our gesture recognition system can accommodate the limitations of an ageing-hand even in presence of hand issues like arthritis or hand tremor.