A 3D Touchless Hand Navigation Sensor for Small-Size and Low-Power Applications

Modern electronic devices have been designed to allow many types of human-machine interfaces with flexibility. One of the user-friendly navigations is interfacing a human hand, but the implementation using conventional devices, such as additional controllers or image sensors, requires a larger size or a higher power. In this paper, a small-size and low-power 3D touchless hand navigation sensor (HNS) is presented. The proposed HNS based on a proximity sensor consists of an LED and integrated photosensors. The x - and y -directions can be controlled by tilting a hand in the x-axis and the y-axis without the need of swiping. The distance between the hand and HNS in the z-axis is calculated by the photosensor dedicated to the z-axis. The experimental results show that the proposed HNS is superior to other types of navigation sensors in terms of size and power.