Systems and methods for recognizing a gesture in a wearable device are disclosed. The system may sense a plurality of sensor measurements during a gesture sensing session, and down-sample the measurements using an adaptive down-sampling interval. The adaptive down-sampling interval may be determined based at least on a fractional part of a ratio of a frame length of the sensor measurements to a specified target length shorter than the frame length. The magnitude of the down-sampled measurements is normalized, and a feature vector may be generated using the normalized measurements. A gesture recognizer module may associate a gesture with the feature vector using gesture classification.