Ever since the assemblage of the first computer, efforts have been made to improve the way people could use machines. Recently, the usage of smart environments has become popular in order to make everyday living more comfortable and to improve the quality of living of humans. In this paper, a hand posture and gesture modeling and recognition system is introduced, which can be used as an interface to make possible communication with smart environment (intelligent space) by simple hand gestures. The system transforms preprocessed data of the detected hand into a fuzzy hand-posture feature model by using fuzzy neural networks and based on this model determines the actual hand posture applying fuzzy inference. Finally, from the sequence of detected hand postures, the system can recognize the hand gesture of the user.