E-Gesture: a collaborative architecture for energy-efficient gesture recognition with hand-worn sensor and mobile devices

Gesture is a promising mobile User Interface modality that enables eyes-free interaction without stopping or impeding movement. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of E-Gesture, an energy-efficient gesture recognition system using a hand-worn sensor device and a smartphone. E-gesture employs a novel gesture recognition architecture carefully crafted by studying sporadic occurrence patterns of gestures in continuous sensor data streams and analyzing the energy consumption characteristics of both sensors and smartphones. We developed a closed-loop collaborative segmentation architecture, that can (1) be implemented in resource-scarce sensor devices, (2) adaptively turn off power-hungry motion sensors without compromising recognition accuracy, and (3) reduce false segmentations generated from dynamic changes of body movement. We also developed a mobile gesture classification architecture for smartphones that enables HMM-based classification models to better fit multiple mobility situations.