Revolutionary
Technology Enables Objects To Know How They Are Being Touched
(May 3, 2012) A doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a
smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips and a
chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining or
leaning forward are among the many possible applications of Touché, a new
sensing technique developed by a team at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and
Carnegie Mellon University.
Touché is a
form of capacitive touch sensing, the same principle underlying the types of touchscreens
used in most smartphones. But instead of sensing electrical signals at a single
frequency, like the typical touchscreen, Touché monitors capacitive signals
across a broad range of frequencies.
This Swept
Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS) makes it possible to not only detect a
"touch event," but to recognize complex configurations of the hand or
body that is doing the touching. An object thus could sense how it is being
touched, or might sense the body configuration of the person doing the touching.