Fesability of a micro LoJack type device.

[Thick8]

Hi All,
I would like to make a glove with a small transmitter antenna on the index finger. A small receiver similar to a LoJack device would track the finger. The device would need to be extremely accurate to follow small movement (1 mm?) of the transmitter. I’ve made a device that uses an IR LED, a 120 FPS camera, and the CameraMouse software but the LED is not always in view of the camera so the tracking is lost.
Is there any off the shelf components that come to mind? Is this level of precise RF tracking possible?

 

[rbelli1]

There are some millimeter wave systems that are normally designed to be used as active sensing devices. They may be programmable to be passive devices that might do what you want.

BoB

Edit: I don't know enough about this to say which ones are able to be used outside the intended purpose. Just google "millimeter wave soc" and you will get tons of devices.

 

[Tom.G]

The usual approach for that kind of tracking is to paint a target of a contrasting color on the glove and use ambient lighting. For testing you could use just some sticky tape of a contrasting color. A fancier approach is use retro-reflective paint or tape (3M makes both) and place illumination at the camera. Use a stripe around the finger if occlusion is a problem, or a pattern of dots to distinguish different rotations of the finger/hand.

There are other technologies that do not require line-of-sight to the hand but are a bit more complicated, some use just image recognition to find the fingers. A Google search gets over 300,000,000 hits. https://www.google.com/search?&q=video+tracking+of+hand+position

Cheers,
Tom

 

[Rive]

Is this level of precise RF tracking possible?

Not within reasonable budget I think.

Maybe you can use multiple cameras with different view angles and additional software to patch up data if one tracking is lost?