CapGlasses: Untethered Capacitive Sensing with Smart Glasses

Augmenting the human body using wearable technology can be particularly interesting to sense context. The user's context includes the mental and physical state, which is inferable by detecting facial and head related gestures. For the recognition of these gestures, we propose instrumenting a pair of glasses with Capacitive Sensing (CapSense) technology. We demonstrate proximity sensing with CapSense for mobile use despite its commonly known limitations in context of mobility. Moreover, we demonstrate how to incorporate transparent sensing electrodes into the glass and copper electrodes into the frame while being potentially invisible in a future specs product. We demonstrate an untethered battery-powered glasses prototype, CapGlasses, to sense facial expressions and head gestures. We selected a set of 12 gestures and ran a study with 12 users. We obtained an average accuracy of 89.6% by a user-dependent machine learning model. We focused on providing clear documentation to enable a straightforward replication of our technology.