SoylentNews

tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

Hackaday has a story on the proof of concept for a new low cost Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) system [hackaday.com], Tomo.

Tomo uses pair-wise impedance measurements from a ring of eight surface electrodes to reconstruct the internal geometry of the users arm. This provides a low cost hand gesture recognition system, and an example application in a smartwatch is demonstrated.

While this doesn’t have the resolution of an X-ray or CT, there’s still a large amount of information that can be gathered from using this method. Different structures in the body, like bone, will have a different impedance than muscle or other tissues. Even flexed muscle changes its impedance from its resting state, and the team have used their sensor as proof-of-concept for hand gesture recognition.

The Tomo project page [chrisharrison.net] contains additional details and a link to the Carnegie Mellon University paper (PDF) [chrisharrison.net] which goes into details on the hardware prototype.

Original Submission