DropleX: Liquid sensing on tablet touchscreens

TL;DR

DropleX is a novel system that leverages commodity tablet touchscreens to detect and analyze microliter-scale liquids non-invasively, enabling applications in food testing and chemical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a physics-informed method to disable adaptive filters in touchscreens, allowing liquid sensing without hardware modifications, and demonstrates high accuracy in various liquid detection tasks.

Findings

Achieves 89-99% accuracy in detecting adulteration in beverages.

Attains 94-96% accuracy in chemical concentration threshold detection.

Provides through-container adulterant detection with 86-96% accuracy.

Abstract

We present DropleX, the first system that enables liquid sensing using the capacitive touchscreen of commodity tablets. DropleX detects microliter-scale liquid samples, and performs non-invasive, through-container measurements for liquid analysis. These capabilities are made possible by a physics-informed mechanism that disables the touchscreen's built-in adaptive filters, originally designed to reject the effects of liquid drops such as rain, without any hardware modifications. We model the touchscreen's sensing capabilities, limits, and non-idealities to inform the design of a signal processing and learning-based pipeline for liquid sensing. Under controlled laboratory conditions, our system achieves 89-99% accuracy in detecting microliter-scale adulteration in soda, wine, and milk, 94-96% accuracy in threshold detection of trace chemical concentrations, and 86-96% accuracy in through-container adulterant detection. These exploratory results demonstrate the potential of repurposing commodity touchscreens as a liquid characterization platform for laboratory settings, food and beverage testing, and chemical analysis applications.