VibSense: Sensing Touches on Ubiquitous Surfaces through Vibration

Jian Liu, Yingying Chen, Marco Gruteser, Yan Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

48 Scopus citations

Abstract

VibSense pushes the limits of vibration-based sensing to determine the location of a touch on extended surface areas as well as identify the object touching the surface leveraging a single sensor. Unlike capacitive sensing, it does not require conductive materials and compared to audio sensing it is more robust to acoustic noise. It supports a broad array of applications through either passive or active sensing using only a single sensor. In VibSense's passive sensing, the received vibration signals are determined by the location of the touch impact. This allows location discrimination of touches precise enough to enable emerging applications such as virtual keyboards on ubiquitous surfaces for mobile devices. Moreover, in the active mode, the received vibration signals carry richer information of the touching object's characteristics (e.g., weight, size, location and material). This further enables VibSense to match the signals to the trained profiles and allows it to differentiate personal objects in contact with any surface. VibSense is evaluated extensively in the use cases of localizing touches (i.e., virtual keyboards), object localization and identification. Our experimental results demonstrate that VibSense can achieve high accuracy, over 95%, in all these use cases.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2017 14th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9781509065998
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 30 2017
Event14th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2017 - San Diego, United States
Duration: Jun 12 2017Jun 14 2017

Publication series

Name2017 14th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2017

Other

Other14th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking, SECON 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period6/12/176/14/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Media Technology
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Instrumentation

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