HumTouch: Localization of Touch on a Cylindrical Object

HumTouch is a passive touch sensing method that utilizes the environmental electromagnetic waves. Unlike the commonly used touch sensing technology (e.g. capacitive sensing), the method we propose does not need surface activation. In this paper, we applied HumTouch to a semi-conductive wood cylinder (diameter =3 cm, length =30 cm) to localize the human touch on the surface. This was achieved via the model built by the kernel regression analysis and the performance was evaluated through the leave-one-out cross validation. The mean estimation error was 0.22 cm which is smaller than a fingertip. This proves that HumTouch is functional not only on a flat surface but also on a cylindrical surface.