This week, I presented our Design Review to the class and started writing the Design Review written report. I also got the glove that Sophia built to communicate with the python program and made sure that the data is read in correctly. Throughout the process, I found that some of the connections were slightly loose, so for letters that require movement (such as the letter “j”), sometimes the connection would become undone giving -63.0 as the angle read in from the flex sensor. This is something we will need to improve upon. We could also make the sensors fit more tightly to the glove so that it is more sensitive to bending. I also collected data for Stephanie to test the ML models on. However, since we were not able to find time to meet this week, this data is only from me making the gestures while varying my poses slightly, so we cannot be sure that this ML model will be generalizable just yet– this would require us to get data from more people.
Since putting together the glove and implementing the serial communication took less time than expected, we are actually ahead of schedule. This is good because there are still some things we need to fix with the current system (eg. wire connections and recognition of gesture beginning and end), which may take longer than the time we had left for software+hardware integration and adjustments.
For collecting this preliminary set of data, I used a key press to indicate that I am done making the gesture, but we do not want this to be part of the user experience in the final product, so next week I will work on figuring out how the system will recognize that a new gesture has arrived. I will also work on developing the data normalization algorithm.