Inspiration
The inspiration for this project started from an idea for a virtual reality glove. The glove was going to be able to give feedback by using servos and wires to stop the hand from closing. Because we weren't familiar with developing through the Oculus Rift, we ventured to find other uses for this technology. We took a health approach after we realized that the glove could be used to help people who suffer from arthritis. We modified our original idea so that instead of stopping the user from closing their hand, it records data about the movement of each finger.
How it works
The PowerGlove works by using flex sensors to measure the deflection of each finger. The data gets wirelessly transmitted to a computer which will analyze the raw data, filter through the invalid measurements, and store the data on a database. A common method physicians and doctors recommend for patients with arthritis do deal with their pain is simple hand and finger exercises. We have created a web app that walks through these exercises with the patient and records if the user can complete them.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we ran into were figuring out how to communicate between the glove and the web server; finding how to wire the glove so that each movement could intrusively be measured with maximum accuracy.
What I learned
We learned about arthritis and the research going on being the condition; how to read from a serial port, parse the data, and write to a MySql database; and advanced soldering techniques.
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