Abstract. We present a novel method that is able to track a complex deformable object in interaction with a hand. This is achieved by formulating and solving an optimization problem that jointly considers the hand, the deformable object and the hand/object contact points. The optimization evaluates several hand/object contact configuration hypotheses and adopts the one that results in the best fit of the object’s model to the available RGBD observations in the vicinity of the hand. Thus, the hand is not treated as a distractor that occludes parts of the deformable object, but as a source of valuable information. Experimental results on a dataset that has been developed specifically for this new problem illustrate the superior performance of the proposed approach against relevant, state of the art solutions