ReSense
A haptic glove that turns heat and pressure into warnings for people who cannot feel pain.
- Year
- 2025
- Reading
- 04 min
- Figures
- 07
ReSense is a training and guidance glove for people with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP), built in under 48 hours at Stanford’s Immerse the Bay 2025. A sensor glove and a Meta Quest headset turn danger signals — heat, pressure and unsafe contact — into visual and haptic warnings the body can actually perceive, so users can learn their limits before damage occurs.
- Team
- Ege Doğanay
- Chris Park
- Yiming “Danny” Huang
- Maya Soylu
- Disciplines
- Haptics
- Mixed reality
- Wearables
- Physical computing
- Accessibility
- Tools
- Meta Quest / Unity / ESP32 / Bluetooth Low Energy / Flex sensors / Thermistor / Servo motor / Afference ring
- Recognition
- Honorable Mention, Afference Artificial Touch — Immerse the Bay 2025
Pain is one of the body’s most fundamental protective mechanisms. People with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain (CIP) live without it: their sense of touch works normally, but pain signals never reach the brain — leaving them exposed to burns, cuts, broken bones and tissue damage from everyday activities.
ReSense is a glove that gives them a new way to sense danger before damage occurs.
A new sensory channel
ReSense is a training and guidance tool. A Meta Quest headset, a sensor glove and haptic feedback convert danger signals — heat, pressure and unsafe contact duration — into feedback patterns a user can learn to understand.
Instead of relying on pain they cannot feel, people with CIP learn to regulate their limits through a signal their bodies can actually perceive: one that flags the risk before damage occurs and guides them through daily tasks.
CIP is deeply under-researched simply because it’s rare — but no patient should fall through the cracks because of that.”
Reading the hand
Five flex sensors, one per finger, feed an ESP32 that streams their readings over Bluetooth Low Energy. Our Unity app sorts each finger into one of three states — relaxed, contracted or overstressed — and shows them in the headset in green, orange and red: a visual warning for hand positions the wearer cannot feel.
A thermistor on the glove tracks temperature, converted from raw ADC readings to Celsius with the Beta equation and calibration offsets. Below 15°C the edges of the passthrough view pulse a frosty blue; above 50°C they pulse fire-red — warnings for the burns and frostbite that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Fig. 02Gripping a cold bottle, seen through the headset: 14.0°C, with each finger’s state listed beside it.
Fig. 03The glove and breadboard through the passthrough view, reading 16.5°C.
48 hrs
from idea to working glove
5
flex sensors, one per finger
3
finger states, colour-coded in the headset
<15°C
the passthrough pulses blue — above 50°C, red
When two radios wouldn’t share
The plan was for two devices to talk to the Quest at once: the ESP32 sending sensor and temperature data, and an Afference haptic ring answering with touch. The two Bluetooth connections kept interfering — dropped links, lost data — and despite long debugging of the Android BLE stack, GATT services and connection lifecycles, we could not make them stable together.
With time running out, and reliable feedback critical to patient safety, we replaced the ring with a servo motor that oscillates to simulate vibration. It runs independently of the ESP32’s Bluetooth link, and proved more reliable and cheaper.
We then calibrated its frequency, amplitude and duration so that each warning — finger strain, extreme temperature — feels distinct and recognisable. It wasn’t the approach we set out with, but it gave us a simpler, more robust system.
System
- 01
FlexGlove
A DIY glove with five flex sensors and a thermistor, wired to an ESP32 that streams readings over Bluetooth Low Energy.
- 02
Finger states
Unity maps each finger to Relaxed (extended), Contracted (normal flexion) or Overstressed (bent too far), colour-coded in the headset.
- 03
Temperature
Beta-equation conversion of raw ADC readings, with calibration offsets. Under 15°C or over 50°C, the passthrough edges pulse blue or red.
- 04
Servo haptics
A servo oscillates at frequencies and intensities matched to the severity of each condition — a vibration the wearer can feel.
- 05
Two build targets
The Unity Editor reads the glove over serial and the Quest over BLE, so we could iterate at the desk and deploy to the headset.
What we learned, and what’s next
Hardware integration often means pivoting when devices fail or refuse to work together; the Bluetooth problems taught us to put reliability and the user’s needs ahead of the original plan. Designing for CIP made the case for alternative feedback wherever a natural sense is absent.
Next, we want robust object detection and a vision-language model to make the mixed-reality layer smarter, and a more compact glove that can adapt to other parts of the body — ideally with haptics in the small, unobtrusive form factor of Afference’s ring.
