Preliminary Application of Gesture Recognition to Virtual Acupuncture

Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) is a style of traditional medicine built on a foundation of more than 2,500 years of Chinese medical practice, which includes various forms of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massag, qigong exercise, and dietary therapy. TCM is widely used in China and is becoming increasingly available in Europe and North America. Besides, acupuncture is a form of alternative medicine in which thin needles are inserted into the body. It is a key component of TCM. In our study, we focused on the virtual acupuncture training system, which is based on the Oculus virtual headset and gesture device - Leap Motion. However, the accuracy of gesture recognition is limited by the data collection from Leap Motion. In our study, our implementation is based on the data reduction, offline model training with Machine Learning algorithms, and online gesture recognition for acupuncture. The experiments showed that our system can really improve the recognition results on the three gesture types, when we tried to use the virtual acupuncture system.