ORIGINAL RESEARCH Wireless hand gesture controlled multiple musical instruments Pranshu Jhamb 1 • Arvind Rehalia 1 Received: 25 May 2017 / Accepted: 18 January 2018 Ó Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Computer Applications and Management 2018 Abstract Background/objectives We live in two worlds: the physi- cal and the digital. We can touch, see, feel, hear and taste the physical world. The digital represents the information, data, and software. The basic idea of our system is to take a part of the physical word, filled with music and drop it into the digital word by replacing a guitar, a drum set or any other kind of musical instrument with merely two hand gloves. Methods/statistical analysis Each of the gloves will embed a micro controller, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a transmitter. The motion of the IMU will be processed in each of the micro controller and will be transmitted via respective transmitters. The data will be received by the third micro controller, consisting of two receiving modules. The signals will be transmitted on the respective move- ments of one’s hand and the bend experienced in the fin- gers (the same situation occurs while playing the actual guitars). The received data will be processed at the recei- vers end and henceforth converted to musical sound. Findings The system will be light weighted, easy for a learner and can be used to play multiple types of sounds. It is working efficiently as soothing amplified sound produced. Application/improvements The system will be easier to carry and may replace big clumsy musical instruments. It will be much easier to play for everyone especially for people with disabilities. Keywords Complementary filters  Inertial measurement unit  Flex sensing  Gesture recognition 1 Introduction There are three kinds of human beings living on this pla- net—developers, users and the ones who do not use it. A question came to our mind for the third type the category that ‘‘Why don’t they use it?’’ The answer came to our senses thinking about how the computer systems came into existence and daily use for a common man in late 1980s. Before the early 1990s no one used the computer systems. The systems were too complicated to learn for the user. In the late 1980s, the GUI or graphical user interface was introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs) which require com- mands to be typed on the keyboard. They were simply easy to use. This is our objective of our system. We created a musical system that can easily be used by a common man to play any sort of music he/she wish for. Rather than holding a set of four or five string on a guitar, one can easily bend one finger. The 16 basic chords which are very difficult to hold on can be easily bound on combinations of four fingers. Keeping it simple for the users is always a top priority so that one can use it without actually investing time in learning it. The gesture control will not only make it easy for the users but it can be played by those who are not able to play any musical instrument. There are over 285 million people that are visually impaired, worldwide. Music is one thing that may unite different kinds of people. The hand glove system will be an aid for the blinds and & Arvind Rehalia rehaliaarvind@gmail.com Pranshu Jhamb pranshujhamb93@gmail.com 1 Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering, A-4, Paschim Vihar, New Delhi 110063, India 123 Int. j. inf. tecnol. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-018-0096-1