Coming in handy: CeTI-Age — A comprehensive database of kinematic hand movements across the lifespan

Abstract

Abstract The Tactile Internet aims to advance human-human and human-machine interactions that also utilize hand movements in real, digitized, and remote environments. Attention to elderly generations is necessary to make the Tactile Internet age inclusive. We present the first age-representative kinematic database consisting of various hand gesturing and grasping movements at individualized paces, thus capturing naturalistic movements. We make this comprehensive database of kinematic hand movements across the adult lifespan (CeTI-Age-Kinematic-Hand) publicly available to facilitate a deeper understanding of intra-individual–focusing especially on age-related differences–and inter-individual variability in hand kinematics. The core of the database contains participants’ hand kinematics recorded with wearable resistive bend sensors, individual static 3D hand models, and all instructional videos used during the data acquisition. Sixty-three participants ranging from age 20 to 80 years performed six repetitions of 40 different naturalistic hand movements at individual paces. This unique database with data recorded from an adult lifespan sample can be used to advance machine-learning approaches in hand kinematic modeling and movement prediction for age-inclusive applications.