Wrist View: Understanding Human Activity Through the Hand

Abstract

Understanding human-object interaction is important for recognizing the activity and the sequence of actions performed. Egocentric tracking of people’s actions and interactions has long been a research topic in many fields. Humans use their hands to manipulate objects in their daily lives to perform various activities. We contend that it is possible to determine human activity by watching how the wrist, palm, and fingers move and how they affect objects in the immediate area. There is a need to recognize the sequence of human actions. This is the key to understanding the activities and inferring the success or failure of the activity when manipulating objects. In this paper, we present a new perspective view, the wrist-centric view, a view from the wrist of the person while performing activities of daily living (ADLs). We explored activities of daily living (ADLs) through the wrist-centric view to identify activities where this novel view is advantageous over other egocentric views. This paper explores the importance of understanding human-object interaction in identifying activities and recognizing ADLs in finer detail. ADLs such as cooking, laundry, eating, drinking, doing dishes, interacting with people, gesturing, shopping, reading, walking, and interacting with everyday objects such as keys, glasses, and medication were selected to depict the representational motions a person needs to perform to carry out daily tasks. We provide different perspectives on these activities, including chest-centric and wrist-centric views, and demonstrate which scenarios the wrist-centric view is most advantageous.