You are going to need some sort of microprocessor in each hand held device.
An ESP8266 (such as the Wemos D1 or similar) might be an economic solution as it includes a microprocessor that can be programmed using the Arduino IDE and WiFi capability. You could use a laptop as a small server to which the hand-units could communicate via a WiFi router (or is the term Access Point?).
Or if you really need to save money just use a bare ESP8266 with a few external components.
I have been using nRF24s for remote control for model trains with an Atmega 328 as the brains. They are not expensive but they are rather tedious to construct.
...R