Data from: WatchHand: Enabling Continuous Hand Pose Tracking On Off-the-Shelf Smartwatches
These files contain data supporting all results reported in Kim et. al. WatchHand: Enabling Continuous Hand Pose Tracking On Off-the-Shelf Smartwatches. Tracking hand poses on wrist-wearables enables rich, expressive interactions, yet remains unavailable on commercial smartwatches, as prior implementations rely on external sensors or custom hardware, limiting their real-world applicability. To address this, we present WatchHand, the first continuous 3D hand pose tracking system implemented on off-the-shelf smartwatches using only their built-in speaker and microphone. WatchHand emits inaudible frequency-modulated continuous waves and captures their reflections from the hand. These acoustic signals are processed by a deep-learning model that estimates 3D hand poses for 20 finger joints. We evaluate WatchHand across diverse real-world conditions -- multiple smartwatch models, wearing-hands, body postures, noise conditions, pose-variation protocols -- and achieve a mean per-joint position error of 7.87 mm in cross-session tests with device remounting. Although performance drops for unseen users or gestures, the model adapts effectively with lightweight fine-tuning on small amounts of data. Overall, WatchHand lowers the barrier to smartwatch-based hand tracking by eliminating additional hardware while enabling robust, always-available interactions on millions of existing devices.
Jiwan Kim, Chi-Jung Lee, Hohurn Jung, Tianhong Yu, Ruidong Zhang, Ian Oakley, Cheng Zhang. (2026) Data from: WatchHand: Enabling Continuous Hand Pose Tracking On Off-the-Shelf Smartwatches [Data set] Cornell University Library eCommons Repository. https://doi.org/10.7298/qf1v-j805