# Enabling Voice-Accompanying Hand-to-Face Gesture Recognition with Cross-Device Sensing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10441 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10441/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LION-FS: Fast & Slow Video-Language Thinker as Online Video Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03663/) (2025)
- [WatchGuardian: Enabling User-Defined Personalized Just-in-Time Intervention on Smartwatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05783/) (2025)
- [Towards Ubiquitous Intelligent Hand Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13543/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Gestures performed accompanying the voice are essential for voice interaction to convey complementary semantics for interaction purposes such as wake-up state and input modality. In this paper, we investigated voice-accompanying hand-to-face (VAHF) gestures for voice interaction. We targeted hand-to-face gestures because such gestures relate closely to speech and yield significant acoustic features (e.g., impeding voice propagation). We conducted a user study to explore the design space of VAHF gestures, where we first gathered candidate gestures and then applied a structural analysis to them in different dimensions (e.g., contact position and type), outputting a total of 8 VAHF gestures with good usability and least confusion. To facilitate VAHF gesture recognition, we proposed a novel cross-device sensing method that leverages heterogeneous channels (vocal, ultrasound, and IMU) of data from commodity devices (earbuds, watches, and rings). Our recognition model achieved an accuracy of 97.3% for recognizing 3 gestures and 91.5% for recognizing 8 gestures, excluding the "empty" gesture, proving the high applicability. Quantitative analysis also sheds light on the recognition capability of each sensor channel and their different combinations. In the end, we illustrated the feasible use cases and their design principles to demonstrate the applicability of our system in various scenarios.