The project for my Sophomore Design class at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. For our semester long project, my group decided to make a wearable device that could translate hand gestures into mouse input for a computer. We nicknamed the device “The BAND” as an acronym of the involved members first names.

Reading Hand Gestures

To read the user’s hand position, we used an electromyography (EMG) sensor attached to the forearm with silver coated fabric and conductive gel. Whenever a muscle flexes in the human body it releases a very small amount of voltage.

The final project for my Circuits II class. Our task was to come up with a project that could be done as a if it were a lab exercise. We could use any equipment within the lab and would write up the process as if it were an exercise received from the professor.

Wireless electricity always interested me. Being able to connect a device for power without any wires makes the whole process seem like something from a sci-fi film. To keep our project simple, we decide to power just an LED and measure the power transferred to understand the efficiency of wireless vs wired.