Soft-Touch or Hard-Touch: Quantifying Touches through A New System Focusing on A Pool Touchpad for Measuring Timing of Swimmers

The swimming turn or finishing presents an integral part of competitive swimming, and the time it takes by a swimmer to push off the wall is a significant factor in their ratings. Therefore, it is essential to have a reliable way to measure the timing of touch, i.e., wall-contact, over the finishing or turning points. To do so, swimming pool touchpads are widely used in swimming competitions to overcome human error in measurements by enabling touch-sensing systems at the finishing or turning points. The touch-sensing devices use their sensitive touch sensors to record time with millisecond accuracy, providing athletes with the most precise measurements possible. However, these devices might need a minimal force applied from the swimmers to sense the touch, and thus, to record the timing of the touch. As such, insufficient force applied on the touchpad during swimming could cause skipping the time log. As a result, it is critical to have a trustworthy method for measuring the extent of touch or wall-contact exerted over the touch-sensing systems. This study, for the first time in the literature to the best of our knowledge, proposes such a method for measuring the extent of touch or wall-contact for swimming pool touchpads. In the process of proposing the method, we design and develop a bi-modal sensing module to distinguish the soft-touch and hard-touch exerted over a real pool touchpad used in a swimming pool organizing national and international competitions. Our experiments show that the pool touchpad under experimentation is not always accurate in registering touches. It sometimes fails to register low-force touches while generally registering touches with high force.