We stumbled onto this video this week showing a MeArm being controlled by hand gestures, recorded on a mobile phone. This author used a MeArm Maker Kit, with some more hardware listed below.
The setup for is seems to be extremely simple, using an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, and an android phone. The author has included a link to their code on github.
This project uses the Google MediaPipe project, where hand tracking is one of the many available features, so this would be an excellent and cheap way to get into image processing.
We think this is a great project and look forward to trying it out.