2DR: Towards Fine-Grained 2-D RFID Touch Sensing

TL;DR

The paper presents 2DR, a cost-effective RFID-based touch sensing system that detects two-dimensional human touch using a single RFID tag and standard readers, enabling flexible and scalable touch interfaces.

Contribution

Introducing 2DR, a novel RFID tag design that uses shape and phase classification to sense 2D touch with minimal hardware, reducing costs and enabling flexible applications.

Findings

Effective 2D touch sensing with a single RFID tag.

High accuracy in classifying touch activities.

Potential for extension to 3D sensing.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce 2DR, a single RFID tag which can seamlessly sense two-dimensional human touch using off-the-shelf RFID readers. Instead of using a two-dimensional tag array to sense human finger touch on a surface, 2DR only uses one or two RFID chip(s), which reduces the manufacturing cost and makes the tag more suitable for printing on flexible materials. The key idea behind 2DR is to design a custom-shape antenna and classify human finger touch based on unique phase information using statistical learning. We printed 2DR tag on FR-4 substrate and use off-the-shelf UHF-RFID readers (FCC frequency band) to sense different touch activities. Experiments show great potential of our design. Moreover, 2DR can be further extended to 3D by building stereoscopic model.