Prototyping Smart Eyewear with Capacitive Sensing for Facial and Head Gesture Detection

The prevalence of smart eyewear, particularly in the form of eye glasses, has continuously increased. In this paper, we explore instrumenting a pair of glasses with Capacitive Sensing (CapSense) technology. We conducted three studies, in which we (1) explore a suitable CapSense setup for rapid prototyping; (2) reveal the potential of detecting facial and head gestures with a CapSense glasses prototype; and (3) investigate the technical feasibility of using a passive electric field sensing. Instead of training a low-dimensional gesture set that works across different users (e.g., eye winks), we selected a set of 12 facial and head related gestures, which we classified by relying on user-dependent machine learning models.