Touching physical buttons to interact with public electronic devices has raised some concerns regrading disease transmission following the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of hand gestures as a touchless replacement sounds appealing, but comes with the challenge of recognizing which gesture is being performed by the user, with only the processing power of a microcontroller. This paper explores the use of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their derivatives to recognize hand gestures on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE. The neural networks receive input from 3 OPT101 photodiodes, which emit a voltage that increases with the intensity of light that hits them, meaning they can effectively track hand shadows cast by the user’s hand under ambient light. After testing various RNN-based neural network architectures, CNN-LSTMs produced the highest validation accuracy. However, due to issues with the testing setup, the highest validation accuracy measured for a CNN-LSTM was only 43%, indicating that further work is required.