Magnetic/conductive/elastic multi-material 3D-printed self-powered sensing gloves for underwater/smoke environmental Human-Computer Interaction

Current Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) devices allow interactive communications between the users’ gestures and the computers. However, extreme environments beyond atmosphere, such as underwater or smoke, will greatly interrupt the normal operation of existing HCI devices. Here we demonstrated the fabrication of 3D-printed self-powered sensing gloves that can be used for underwater/smoke environmental HCI. A home-made multi-extrusion-head manipulator, which can simultaneously print three kinds of functional inks including magnetic, conductive and elastic materials, has been developed to generate the self-powered sensing gloves. The magnetic part was printed on the polymeric thumb region while four liquid metal coils were printed on the other four fingers, yielding the self-powered gesture recognition by clicking the fingers or nine-key input method keys of alphabetic typing. Our work offers a design of self-powered sensing glove for gesture recognition and therefore provides a pathway to realize HCI in extreme environments.