Capacitive Near-Field Communication for Ubiquitous Interaction and Perception

Smart objects within instrumented environments offer an al-ways available and intuitive way of interacting with a system. Connecting these objects to other objects in range or even to smartphones and computers, enables substantially innova-tive interaction and sensing approaches. In this paper, we investigate the concept of Capacitive Near-Field Communi-cation to enable ubiquitous interaction with everyday objects in a short-range spatial context. Our central contribution is a generic framework describing and evaluating this communi-cation method in Ubiquitous Computing. We prove the rele-vance of our approach by an open-source implementation of a low-cost object tag and a transceiver offering a high-quality communication link at typical distances up to 15 cm. More-over, we present three case studies considering tangible in-teraction for the visually impaired, natural interaction with everyday objects, and sleeping behavior analysis. Author Keywords capacitive sensing; capacitive near-field communication; capacitive communication; intrabody communication ACM Classification Keyword