Networked gloves

As I mentioned some times ago gloves somehow do attract a big share of attention among the wearable technology community and fabulous ideas keep flowing.

Today’s interactive glove has been designed by Ashwin Rajan and Kevin Cannon with the intention to provide a gesture-based communication tool for firefighters, the Frontline Gloves.

Frontline Gloves are a pair of networked gloves that allow two fire-fighters to use hand gestures to communicate with each other in a fire-fighting situation.

Firefighters and other professions where communication and coordination is essential and life saving but high noise levels gesture communication is used. But when low visibility joins the game, gesture control does not help either, hence technology enhanced gloves like the Frontline Gloves and fill in the missing link.

Each glove contains the control electronics, a wireless XBee module, a sonar sensor which can detect distance in a low visibility environment and ultra-bright LEDs to display the gesture controlled information. The gestures are picked up by bend sensors in the fingers.

Although the purpose of the course was to learn about the Arduino platform, testing the prototyping potential on an hypothetical usage scenario, the duo has made a highly interesting design proposal with practical value and demonstrating the sheer unlimited possibilities not only of the Arduino platform but also the potential of wearable technologies.

Ashwin and Kevin deserve a thumbs up = OK send by the Frontline Glove.

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