Hand Gestures for Elderly Care Using a Microsoft Kinect

The link between humans and computers, called human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques, has the potential to improve quality of life, where analysis of the information collected from humans through computers allows personal patient requirements to be achieved. Among them, a computer vision system for helping elderly patients currently attracts a large amount of research interest to avail of personal requirements. This paper proposes a real-time computer vision system to recognize hand gestures for elderly patients who are disabled or unable to translate their orders or feelings into words. The proposed system uses a Microsoft Kinect v2 Sensor, installed in front of the elderly patient, to recognize hand signs that correspond to a specific request and sends their meanings to the care provider or family member through a microcontroller and global system for mobile communications (GSM). The experimental results illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed system, which showed promising results with several hand signs, whilst being reliable, safe, comfortable, and cost-effective.