A Unified Method for Multiple Home Appliances Control through Static Finger Gestures

Various electrical appliances have penetrated into people´s daily life including televisions, video and audio equipment, and other household appliances. Many of them provide an infrared Remote Controller (RC) for appliance control. But as the number of controllers increased, it becomes not so convenient to access different controllers to control different devices, especially for the senior citizens with diminished physical and mental ability. In this paper, a one-for-all gesture-based remote control system is proposed by which consumers can control different appliances in a nature and unified way. Firstly, two kinds of fundamental devices for the physical layer of the novel control method is presented, which including a compact wearable sensing mote called Magic Ring (MR) and its command receiver and executer called Electrical Appliance Node (EA-Node). Moreover, a unified control protocol for application layer is defined to solve the problems of effective target selection and function navigation. A comparative study is performed between the proposed MR-based method and traditional RC-based method on three aspects: operation effectiveness, learning curve, and fatigue degree. The results of experiment show that MR-based method can achieve a competitive performance by as much as 88% of RC-based method (in general for a beginner, the completed tasks using MR is about 40% as many as using RC. And after several minutes of practice, that ratio can raise to about 60%).