meraGlove

Track and analyze weight training and arm movement.

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Inspiration

Tracking of whole body physical activity is in full commercial use today. The next need in that space is for physical tracking of extremities, especially arms. Such tracking is useful to provide feedback for physical training, work force safety, and to add smartness to prosthetics. We use Arduino 101 to demonstrate a smart glove application that demonstrates some of these functions that have been built out from industrial design to a mobile app and a cloud based analytics backend.

What it does

meraGlove performs following functions;

  1. Measure the weight being lifted using Tekscan piezoresistive sensor.
  2. Measures 3-axis accelerometer data from Curie and computes arm movement.
  3. Provide on glove LCD visual feedback of reps.
  4. Transmits all the data via Bluetooth Low Energy connection to mobile phone and in turn to the cloud Firebase DB.
  5. Buzzer notification for audio feedback of motion.
  6. Logging and analysis of historical data on the cloud.

How we built it

We prototyped it using a Hand/Wrist Brace, an Arduino 101 board, Grove Sensor Kit LCD and buzzer, and a Tekscan Flexiforce sensor. The data collection and sensor processing happen on Arduino and metadata is transferred to a mobile app and a cloud analytics platform.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Accurate force and weight measurement: Tekscan sensor along with calibration algorithms in our design mitigated this challenge.
  2. Power draw of this system is a bit too high. This will need to be addressed before making special PCBs.
  3. Sketch file uploading to Arduino 101 fails 3/10 times. Needed to perform it multiple times. Similarly, BLE implementation on Arduino 101 does not have good references so we had to develop some workarounds. For example, using custom UUID we could not make the notifications work so we implemented a workaround using battery service profile. Will be happy to provide more feedback on it if needed.

    4. Accomplishments that we're proud of

    A family of a disabled person has expressed interest that we convert this prototype to a specific need for them. We feel really happy that our work can help some one in need.

    What we learned

    We learned how to use Arduino 101, Grove Sensor Kit, and weight/force measurement techniques. Also, we learned developing apps in Android Studio and Firebase.

    What's next for meraGlove

    We are considering a Kickstarter project.

    Documentation

    All the documentation, code, sketch file, wiring diagram, and app are accessible via Github repo or via the GitHub project page (first link below).

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