Capacitive Near-Field Communication for Ubiquitous Interaction and Perception

Smart objects within instrumented environments offer an always available and intuitive way of interacting with a system. Connecting these objects to other objects in range or even to smartphones and computers, enables substantially innovative interaction and sensing approaches. In this paper, we investigate the concept of Capacitive Near-Field Communication to enable ubiquitous interaction with everyday objects in a short-range spatial context. Our central contribution is a generic framework describing and evaluating this communication method in Ubiquitous Computing. We prove the relevance of our approach by an open-source implementation of a low-cost object tag and a transceiver offering a high-quality communication link at typical distances up to 15 cm. Moreover, we present three case studies considering tangible interaction for the visually impaired, natural interaction with everyday objects, and sleeping behavior analysis.