research-article

Capacitive fingerprinting: exploring user differentiation by sensing electrical properties of the human body

Authors:

Chris Harrison,

Ivan PoupyrevAuthors Info & Claims

UIST '12: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Pages 537 - 544

https://doi.org/10.1145/2380116.2380183

Published: 07 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

At present, touchscreens can differentiate multiple points of contact, but not who is touching the device. In this work, we consider how the electrical properties of humans and their attire can be used to support user differentiation on touchscreens. We propose a novel sensing approach based on Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing, which measures the impedance of a user to the environment (i.e., ground) across a range of AC frequencies. Different people have different bone densities and muscle mass, wear different footwear, and so on. This, in turn, yields different impedance profiles, which allows for touch events, including multitouch gestures, to be attributed to a particular user. This has many interesting implications for interactive design. We describe and evaluate our sensing approach, demonstrating that the technique has considerable promise. We also discuss limitations, how these might be overcome, and next steps.

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Cited By

Bian SLiu MZhou BLukowicz PMagno M(2024)Body-Area Capacitive or Electric Field Sensing for Human Activity Recognition and Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435558:1(1-49)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643555
Shen ZLi SZhao XZou J(2024)CT-Auth: Capacitive Touchscreen-Based Continuous Authentication on SmartphonesIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2023.327787936:1(90-106)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3277879
Waghmare ABen Taleb YChatterjee INarendra APatel S(2023)Z-Ring: Single-Point Bio-Impedance Sensing for Gesture, Touch, Object and User RecognitionProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581422(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581422
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Capacitive fingerprinting: exploring user differentiation by sensing electrical properties of the human body
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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cover image ACM Conferences

UIST '12: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

October 2012

608 pages

ISBN:9781450315807

DOI:10.1145/2380116

General Chair:
Rob Miller
MIT CSAIL, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Hrvoje Benko
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Celine Latulipe
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 October 2012

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October 7 - 10, 2012

Massachusetts, Cambridge, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

Bian SLiu MZhou BLukowicz PMagno M(2024)Body-Area Capacitive or Electric Field Sensing for Human Activity Recognition and Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435558:1(1-49)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643555
Shen ZLi SZhao XZou J(2024)CT-Auth: Capacitive Touchscreen-Based Continuous Authentication on SmartphonesIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2023.327787936:1(90-106)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2023.3277879
Waghmare ABen Taleb YChatterjee INarendra APatel S(2023)Z-Ring: Single-Point Bio-Impedance Sensing for Gesture, Touch, Object and User RecognitionProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581422(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581422
Schmitz MRiemann JMüller FKreis SMühlhäuser MKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Oh, Snap! A Fabrication Pipeline to Magnetically Connect Conventional and 3D-Printed ElectronicsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445641(1-11)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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Gong HCui ZWang YShen CZhang DLuo S(2021)eGlove: Designing Interactive Fabric Sensor for Enhancing Contact-Based InteractionsExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451824(1-7)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
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Maity SYang DRedford SDas DChatterjee BSen S(2020)BodyWire-HCIACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/340623827:6(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2020
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Wu TTan LZhang YSeyed TYang XIqbal SMacLean KChevalier FMueller S(2020)CapacitivoProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3379337.3415829(649-661)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2020
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Ku PShao QWu TGong JZhu ZZhou XYang XBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)ThreadSense: Locating Touch on an Extremely Thin Interactive ThreadProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376779(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
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Sugita YMugiraneza JYamagishi S(2018)[Papers] Integrated Transparent NFC Antennas on Touch DisplaysITE Transactions on Media Technology and Applications10.3169/mta.6.2806:4(280-285)Online publication date: 2018
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Hong SJeong EHeo SLee BBaudisch PSchmidt AWilson A(2018)FDSenseProceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3242587.3242644(809-823)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
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