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RIO: A Pervasive RFID-based Touch Gesture Interface

Published: 04 October 2017 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we design and develop RIO, a novel battery-free touch sensing user interface (UI) primitive for future IoT and smart spaces. RIO enables UIs to be constructed using off-the-shelf RFID readers and tags, and provides a unique approach to designing smart IoT spaces. With RIO, any surface can be turned into a touch-aware surface by simply attaching RFID tags to them. RIO also supports custom-designed RFID tags, and thus allows specially customized UIs to be easily deployed into a real-world environment. RIO is built using the technique of impedance tracking: when a human finger touches the surface of an RFID tag, the impedance of the antenna changes. This change manifests as a change in the phase of the RFID backscattered signal, and is used by RIO to track fine-grained touch movement over both off-the shelf and custom built tags. We study this impedance behavior in-depth and show how RIO is a reliable UI primitive that is robust even within a multi-tag environment. We leverage this primitive to build a prototype of RIO that can continuously locate a finger during a swipe movement to within 3 mm of its actual position. We also show how custom-design RFID tags can be built and used with RIO, and provide two example applications that demonstrate its real-world use.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiCom '17: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking
October 2017
628 pages
ISBN:9781450349161
DOI:10.1145/3117811
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 the author(s) 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: 04 October 2017

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Author Tags

  1. RFID
  2. impedance tracking
  3. mutual coupling
  4. touch interface

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  • (2024)ZEROECG: Zero-Sensation ECG Monitoring By Exploring RFID MOSFETProceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking10.1145/3636534.3690690(1237-1251)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2024
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