Through-body Capacitive Touch Communication

Abstract

To overcome the drawbacks and security issues of traditional wireless and RF-based communication techniques, multiple alternative "wireless" communication methods have been investigated. Among them, capacitive touch communication which utilizes the touchscreen process as communication channel has been proposed with the promising future since capacitive touchscreen has been widely known as an important component of pervasive touch-enabled smart devices. In this paper, we present for the first time the indirect method of capacitive touch communication that allows the users to transmit their information from the wearable devices to the touch-enabled devices using human body as a medium. The key idea is to modulate the signal emitted from a wearable device propagating through user's body. These signal can be decoded to extract the transmitted data when the user touch to the touch-surface. In particular, we show a system design of through-body capacitive touch communication channel together with the circuit model analysis. We present our preliminary results of our system, and identify possible challenges for future research and development.