A finger touch force detection method for textile based capacitive tactile sensor arrays

The use of touch-based technology to interact with electronic devices pre-dates modern day multi-touch technology and even the personal computer. It has recently been growing in popularity in wearable computing devices especially in the form of textile based tactile sensor. These sensors often target the detection of not only touch but also force applied. A significant problem arises here in differentiating inputs from an intended finger touch and just a bend of the sensor or other objects touching the sensor. In this work, we present our initial efforts to differentiate between a finger and an insulated object touch event on a custom textile based tactile sensor we developed before. Our experiments show that the two cases could be differentiated using the capacitance change of the neighboring cross-over points.