Double Research & Development Co. has developed a new input device called “amenbo” which can sense the movements and pressure of individual fingers. As the complete hand movements are directly input into the PC, it can be used in a range of applications which require complete hand recognition.

“We put a mouse sensor under each fingertip, and can input the coordinates for each finger as well as the downward pressure of each finger. This means that the actual hand motions are being input to the PC. For example, it is possible for the PC to receive the finger data for however many fingers are needed for an action, operating it with one or both hands.”

The fingers are all linked by a flexible printed mesh base, that is made stretchable to accommodate a variety of different sizes of hands.

“For example, there are 3D image recognition systems like Kinect, but they do not receive finger pressure. But even if there were pressure sensors to receive pressure information it can do different things than Kinect. It is also different from touch panels since a special sensor is attached to each finger, so it can identify which finger on whose hand it is, and even if you lift your fingers off it can follow them from beginning to end.”

One example of an application for this system is manipulating 3D CAD data. Sometimes manipulating 3D CAD data requires using a 3D mouse and a regular mouse using both hands, but in this system the functions can be combined and operated with one hand.

“Our company is making a robot hand with five fingers. For example, if you assigned this to each finger and moved them you could operate the robot hand. These days most robots operate with two or three fingers, but we think that with this it would be simple to link up and have fine control of many flexible fingers. “

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