This technology lets the smartwatch keep track of how your hands and fingers move so you can control devices.
Smartwatches are getting better at doing more things, but they might also get more complicated in the future. People all over the world are working on ways to use them to control computers and interact with the digital world without a mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen.
The goal is that soon we will be able to make better use of what we wear on our wrists and make it more useful in our daily lives. A team of researchers from Cornell University and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea is working toward this goal, having developed a system called WatchHand.
This technology allows regular smartwatches to track hand and finger movements. Remarkably, it doesn't require any new components; it already works with the existing hardware of these watches. According to Digital Trends , which published a report on the research, the system uses the watch's microphone speaker in a unique way: the speaker emits sounds inaudible to the human ear, which bounce off the hand.
These sound waves return to the microphone as an echo, forming a unique pattern based on the hand's position on the fingers. Artificial intelligence then analyzes this echo directly on the watch, allowing it to calculate the hand's position and movement in real time in three dimensions. This technique is comparable to how bats navigate in the dark but applied to a device worn on the wrist. It's also worth noting that because all the data is processed within the watch, it is not transmitted to any third party.
They explain that this system could enable tasks like moving the cursor without a mouse or changing songs with simple gestures. In the future, it could be used for writing in the air, using virtual reality applications, or assisting people with mobility impairments. While the system is currently limited and only works on Android watches, it could be expanded to include many more devices with a simple update.