MoCapaci: Posture and gesture detection in loose garments using textile cables as capacitive antennas

Hymalai Bello, Bo Zhou, Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz

Abstract: We present a wearable system to detect body postures and gestures that does not require sensors to be firmly fixed to the body or integrated into a tight-fitting garment. The sensing system can be used in a loose piece of clothing such as a coat/blazer. It is based on the well-known theremin musical instrument, which we have unobtrusively integrated into a standard men’s blazer using conductive textile antennas and OpenTheremin hardware as a prototype, the ”MoCaBlazer.” Fourteen participants with diverse body sizes and balanced gender distribution mimicked 20 arm/torso movements with the unbuttoned, single-sized blazer. State-of-the-art deep learning approaches were used to achieve average recognition accuracy results of 97.18% for leave one recording out and 86.25% for user independent recognition.