Well, at least scientists at Berkeley's Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) managed to put accelerometers onto a glove, making it act like a virtual keyboard/mouse/you name it.
The Acceleration Sensing Glove (virtual keyboard) was designed to demonstrate that accelerometers can be used to decipher and translate hand gestures into computer interepreted symbols. The glove and software were designed by Seth Hollar, John Perng, and Brian Fisher in Professor Kris Pister's lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
 | Who knows, maybe this will be what you use to control your mobile device with in the future
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An Analog Devices 2 axis ADXL 202 accelerometer is placed on top of each finger on the glove, and additionally, a sixth accelerometer is placed on the back of the hand. The analog signals from the accelerometers are digitized by an Atmel AVR microcontroller, which in turn sends the data to the computer via the serial port. The hardware supports wireless transmission of the data over RF but currently that capability has not been demonstrated.
The raw signals from the accelerometers can be translated into rotations the hand makes with respect to gravity, and these rotation angles are then used to describe a particular finger orientation. The computer tries to find the hand gesture that possesses similar information for each rotation angle, and that way the computer can interpret a particular hand gesture as a unique symbol.
Currently, the team has been looking into recognizing static hand gestures (still hand gestures), examples of which might be the peace sign, thumbs up, a flat hand, and most of the american sign language alphabet. An application that recognizes hand gestures has also been developed, and the application can according to the team recognize almost any hand gesture it is trained with, which would make it an ideal companion for mobile devices where input constraints are abundant.
The team has also developed an application that allows users to use the glove as a mouse pointing device for a Windows 95 system, where by tilting your hand to and from a user is able to move the pointer in the same fashion as any other mouse. Button clicks are handled by pointing certain fingers down.
The Acceleration Sensing Glove is a large-scale device used to model the functionality of something called Smart Dust on fingers. Smart Dust is a project whose 3-year goal is to integrate communications, intelligence, power, and sensors into a package that is no larger than 1 mm3, and integrating a single chip wireless solution with a MEMS accelerometer would yield an autonomous device small enough to apply to the fingernails.
Because of their small size and weight, these Smart Dust devices would be less noticeable than one's own eyeglasses, providing no more discomfort than fingernail polish according to the development team.
Dare we suggest that someone grab a hold of this idea and get started on developing an input method of this kind for PDAs, smartphones and other mobile devices as soon as possible?
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