# Researchers taught an Apple Watch new gestures in about a minute

Source: https://idevice.com/researchers-taught-an-apple-watch-new-gestures-in-about-a-minute
Published: 2026-11-04

> A Northwestern and Carnegie Mellon system learned custom hand movements using only the watch's motion sensors, though you can't install it yet.

Researchers at Northwestern University and Carnegie Mellon University got an Apple Watch to recognize new hand movements after about a minute of practice per movement. Their system is called TransfHAR, and it reads only the accelerometer and gyroscope already inside the watch. No extra sensor, and no new hardware. Nadeem Sarwar reported the work for Digital Trends.

Today's watch knows two gestures: the two-finger tap and the wrist flick. In this study, 10 people wearing a [Series 10](https://idevice.com/smart-watches/apple-watch/roadmap) each picked seven activities of their own, such as stirring coffee, drawing a heart in the air, opening a Gatorade bottle and tying a shoelace. With a minute of recorded movement for each one, the watch recognized them with 90% accuracy.

Thirteen seconds of data per activity reached 86.7%, and a single clip of about two and a half seconds reached 75.2%. Before any of that, the model was trained on roughly 2,760 hours of public wrist movement data from 381 people, most of it broad activities like sitting, walking and exercising.

Training on a new set of activities took less than a second on the watch itself, and a prediction took about 24 milliseconds, with no paired phone or remote server. People could keep adding activities too, and a test with 70 of them pooled into one model stayed above 82%.

For an owner, this could mean a shortcut that starts when you do something, with no button and no voice command. Stir your coffee and your caffeine log opens. Start a set of bicep curls and the watch logs the workout and starts your playlist. The researchers also point to measuring symptoms like tremors or hyperactivity without the wearer doing anything.

Writing, scrolling on a phone and applying lotion look alike to the sensors, and the separate steps of making a latte gave it trouble too. The study was short and controlled, and the team didn't measure what this does to battery life.

One member of the team is a Google research scientist, and the core model is adapted from LSM-2, a wearable sensor model built by Google researchers. It relies on the same kind of motion data nearly every smartwatch collects, so it could reach Wear OS watches too.

You can't install any of this today, so it's no reason to buy a new watch. If it does reach owners, a Series 10 was enough to run it, and that's two models behind the Series 12.