Just Wiggle Your Fingers While Wearing Gloves: ‘Smart Textile’ Reads Movements via Radio Waves

[Financial News] A next-generation smart-textile technology has been developed that allows users to operate computers or machines simply by wiggling their fingers while wearing fabric gloves. The system reads subtle finger movements using only radio-frequency circuits embedded in the fabric, without attaching bulky sensor chips.
Hanyang University announced on the 8th that a research team led by Professor Hyoungsuk Yoo of the Department of Biomedical Engineering had developed a wearable sensor system that combines radio-frequency circuits with glove fabric to simultaneously detect the movements of four fingers and convert them into digital commands.
Conventional motion-sensing gloves require separate detection sensors and extensive wiring at each finger joint, making them stiff to wear and expensive to produce. The research team addressed this limitation with an unconventional approach: using the power divider circuit, which splits signals into multiple paths, as a motion sensor itself.
The team created tiny radio-frequency pathways on soft cotton fabric and connected them along the index, middle, ring and little fingers. When a finger bends or straightens, the circuit deforms and interacts with the finger’s biological tissue, causing subtle changes in the strength of the radio-frequency signal. By detecting these changes, the team accurately determined the real-time state of all four fingers without a separate sensing device.
The system also significantly reduces power consumption and the burden of data processing. Rather than relying on a high-performance computer or complex artificial intelligence, it was designed to recognize whether each finger is extended or bent as ‘1’ or ‘0,’ the basic language of computers. By combining these signals, the system immediately generated 11 digital commands, from 0 to 10, and successfully transmitted real-time control signals to smartphone or monitor displays through an Internet of Things network.
Because the system is lightweight, flexible and structurally simple, its manufacturing process can be streamlined. It is therefore expected to have strong commercialization potential in various fields, including gloves for virtual and augmented reality devices, patient rehabilitation equipment, and smart factories where industrial robots are remotely controlled through hand gestures.
Professor Hyoungsuk Yoo said, "We confirmed that a radio-frequency circuit previously used simply to divide signals can also serve as a sensor that directly reads finger movements." He added, "We plan to expand the detection range to all five fingers and improve long-term wearing stability so that the technology can be used in everyday life."
The study was conducted as part of a project at the Beyond-G Global Innovation Center at Hanyang University, with Amir Sohail participating as the first author. The findings were published online in the September issue of the IEEE Internet of Things Journal, a leading international journal in the field of the Internet of Things.

[email protected] Man-ki Kim Reporter