What is Capacitive Fingerprinting?
Can objects recognize who is touching them? Capacitive Fingerprinting explores how the electrical properties of the human body can be used to differentiate users when they are touching screens or other touch-sensitive devices and objects. Capacitive Fingerprinting enables development of highly personalized interfaces for collaborative applications, multi-user gaming, location-based entertainment where objects "know" who is touching them and can modify their output accordingly.
Capacitive Fingerprinting uses the Touché sensing technology to measure the impedance of a user touching an object across a broad range of signal frequencies. Different people have different bone densities, muscle mass, clothing, and footwear. These personal differences yield unique impedance profiles that enable us to correlate touch events with a particular user. Importantly, this technique does not requiring any user instrumentation.
Publications
Harrison, C., Sato, M., Poupyrev, I. Capacitive Fingerprinting: Exploring User Differentiation by Sensing Electrical Properties of the Human Body. In Proceedings of ACM UIST 2012, 2012. pp. 537-544 [PDF].
Team and Credits
The Capacitive Fingerprinting was developed at Disney Research by Chris Harrison, Munehiko Sato and myself.
Capacitive Fingerprinting is part of the investigation of sensing applications based on Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing approach (e.g. Touché).
