Ring-a-Pose: A Ring for Continuous Hand Pose Tracking
Published in The Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)/UbiComp, 2024
Recommended citation: Tianhong Catherine Yu, Guilin Hu, Ruidong Zhang, Hyunchul Lim, Saif Mahmud, Chi-Jung Lee, Ke Li, Devansh Agarwal, Shuyang Nie, Jinseok Oh, François Guimbretière, and Cheng Zhang. 2024. Ring-a-Pose: A Ring for Continuous Hand Pose Tracking. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 8, 4, Article 189 (December 2024), 30 pages. (Accepted Pending Minor Revisions) https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12980
October 2025 (Expected)
Keyword: 3D Hand Pose Tracking, Micro-finger Gesture Recognition, Smart Ring, Acoustic Sensing
We present Ring-a-Pose, a single untethered ring that tracks continuous 3D hand poses. Located in the center of the hand, the ring emits an inaudible acoustic signal that each hand pose reflects differently. Ring-a-Pose imposes minimal obtrusions on the hand, unlike multi-ring or glove systems. It is not affected by the choice of clothing that may cover wrist-worn systems. In a series of three user studies with a total of 30 participants, we evaluate Ring-a-Pose’s performance on pose tracking and micro-finger gesture recognition. Without collecting any training data from a user, Ring-a-Pose tracks continuous hand poses with a joint error of 14.1mm. The joint error decreases to 10.3mm for fine-tuned user-dependent models. Ring-a-Pose recognizes 7-class micro-gestures with a 90.60% and 99.27% accuracy for user-independent and user-dependent models, respectively. Furthermore, the ring exhibits promising performance when worn on any finger. Ring-a-Pose enables the future of smart rings to track and recognize hand poses using relatively low-power acoustic sensing.