John Perng Sciences
Wearable Virtual Keyboard: Acceleration Sensing Glove
An Electrical Engineering and Computer Science major, John’s research interests are in the rapidly exploding area of wearable computing, a rubric that includes palm pilots, pagers and cell phones. His goal is to design and improve a virtual keyboard for a personal electronic device called the Acceleration Sensing Glove. John has already designed a crude prototype of the glove, featured in Science News and Wired Magazine, that can be used as a mouse in a Microsoft Windows environment and can translate at least 64 different hand gestures into symbols. He plans to make the glove even more user-friendly by designing and integrating a MEMS accelerometer coupled with wireless data transmission and an analog-to-digital converter in an approximately 1/4 square-centimeter package, resulting in a fully functional virtual keyboard with 36 alpha-numerical keys. John proposes to test the glove’s usability and effectiveness with human users, as well as to present his research at the 4th Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing.
