# Development of ML model for triboelectric nanogenerator based sign language detection system

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06220 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06220/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.5778/) (2013)
- [Deep learning for time series classification: a review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04356/) (2018)
- [Data Augmentation of Wearable Sensor Data for Parkinson's Disease Monitoring using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00527/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Survey of Data Augmentation for Time Series Classification with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15951/) (2020)
- [Sign Language Recognition, Generation, and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08597/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sign language recognition (SLR) is vital for bridging communication gaps between deaf and hearing communities. Vision-based approaches suffer from occlusion, computational costs, and physical constraints. This work presents a comparison of machine learning (ML) and deep learning models for a custom triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG)-based sensor glove. Utilizing multivariate time-series data from five flex sensors, the study benchmarks traditional ML algorithms, feedforward neural networks, LSTM-based temporal models, and a multi-sensor MFCC CNN-LSTM architecture across 11 sign classes (digits 1-5, letters A-F). The proposed MFCC CNN-LSTM architecture processes frequency-domain features from each sensor through independent convolutional branches before fusion. It achieves 93.33% accuracy and 95.56% precision, a 23-point improvement over the best ML algorithm (Random Forest: 70.38%). Ablation studies reveal 50-timestep windows offer a tradeoff between temporal context and training data volume, yielding 84.13% accuracy compared to 58.06% with 100-timestep windows. MFCC feature extraction maps temporal variations to execution-speed-invariant spectral representations, and data augmentation methods (time warping, noise injection) are essential for generalization. Results demonstrate that frequency-domain feature representations combined with parallel multi-sensor processing architectures offer enhancement over classical algorithms and time-domain deep learning for wearable sensor-based gesture recognition. This aids assistive technology development.