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This paper explores the feasibility of using touchless textile sensors as an input to environmental control for individuals with upper-extremity mobility impairments. These sensors are capacitive textile sensors embedded into clothing and act as proximity sensors.

We present results from five individuals with spinal cord injury as they perform gestures that mimic an alphanumeric gesture set. The gestures are used for controlling appliances in a home setting. Our setup included a custom visualization that provides feedback to the individual on how the system is tracking the movement and the type of gesture being recognized. Our study included a two-stage session at a medical school with five subjects with upper extremity mobility impairment.

The experimenting sessions derived binary gesture classification accuracies greater than 90% on average. The sessions also revealed intricate details …