This article presents the design and validation of a wearable glove-based multifinger-motion capture device (SmartGlove), specifically focusing on the development of a new optical linear encoder (OLE). The OLE specially designed for this project is compact and lightweight and has low-power consumption. The characterization tests showed that the OLE's digital out put has good linearity and is accurate. The first prototype of SmartGlove, which uses 10 OLEs to capture the flexion/extension motion of the 14 finger joints, was constructed based on the multipoint-sensing method. A user study evaluated the SmartGlove using a standard protocol and found high repeatability and reliability in both the gripped and flat-hand positions compared with four other evaluated data gloves using the same protocol.