With the development of virtual reality (VR) interaction technology, data glove has become one of the most popular devices for human-computer interaction. It’s valuable to design high-sensitive and flexible sensor for data glove. Therefore, a low-cost data glove based on self-compensating elastic optical fiber sensor with self-calibration function is proposed. The tunable and stretchable elastic fiber was fabricated by a simple, economical and controllable method. The fiber has good flexibility and high stability under stretching, bending and indentation deformation. The optical fibers are installed in the sensor in a U shape with a bending radius of 5 mm. Compared with the straight fiber, the response sensitivity of the U-shaped fiber to deformation is increased by about 7 times at most. The reference optical fiber is connected to the sensor, which effectively improves the stability and accuracy of the sensor system. In addition, the sensors are easy to install so that the data gloves can be customized for different hand shapes. In the gesture capture test, it can respond quickly and guide the manipulator to track the gesture. This responsive and stable data glove has broad development potential in motion monitoring, telemedicine and human-computer interaction.