A patent application spotted by Patently Apple suggests that the Apple Watch turning on its display as you raise your wrist could be just the first of many supported gestures. Pointing, waving and even extending pinky and thumb in a ‘phone me’ gesture could all be used to initiate actions on either the Watch itself or a paired iPhone.

Apple gives a number of illustrative examples of such gestures …

While voice and touch input can be an effective way to control a device, there may be situations where the user’s ability to speak the verbal command or perform the touch gesture may be limited.

This [patent] relates to a device that detects a user’s motion and gesture input through the movement of one or more of the user’s hand, arm, wrist, and fingers, for example, to provide commands to the device or to other devices […] The device can interpret the gesture as an input command, and the device can perform an operation.

Turning your hand palm-down and making patting motions could decline an incoming phone call, lifting or dropping your hand palm-up could raise or lower the speaker volume and waving a hand sideways in front of you could turn a page in an ebook. You can see a table of examples below.

But the patent application is far more ambitious than this, depicting someone using sign language, and the paired iPhone able to recognize the signs and convert it to spoken or written language.

Apple describes how the wearable device could use a wide variety of sensor types to detect and interpret gestures.

This is obviously a far more complex undertaking than some of the Apple patent applications we share, but it’s not difficult to see how even today’s Apple Watch could detect and act on some of the simpler gestures. As always, there’s no telling whether Apple will choose to implement any of the ideas described – we just share the ones which seem particularly interesting.

One or more optical sensors, inertial sensors, mechanical contact sensors, and myoelectric sensors, to name just a few examples, can detect movements of the user’s body. Based on the detected movements, a user gesture can be determined.

Apple last updated the Watch two weeks ago, with the launch of watchOS 2.2.