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FINGER IDENTIFICATION
By vibratory communication

Identifying Contact Fingers on Touch Sensitive Surfaces by Ring-Based Vibratory Communication
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'21)
ABSTRACT
As computing paradigms shift toward mobile and ubiquitous interaction, there is an increasing demand for wearable interfaces supporting multifaceted input in smart living environments. In this regard, we introduce a system that identifies contact fingers using vibration as a modality of communication. We investigate the vibration characteristics of the communication channels involved and simulate the transmission of vibration sequences. In the simulation, we test and refine modulation and demodulation methods to design vibratory communication protocols that are robust to environmental noises and can detect multiple simultaneous contact fingers. As a result, we encode an on-off keying sequence with a unique carrier frequency to each finger and demodulate the sequences by applying cross-correlation. We verify the communication protocols in two environments, laboratory and cafe, where the resulting highest accuracy was 93 % and 90.5 %, respectively. Our system achieves over 91 % accuracy in identifying seven contact states from three fingers while wearing only two actuator rings with the aid of a touch screen. Our findings shed light on diversifying touch interactions on rigid surfaces by means of vibratory communication.
FULL CITATION
Seungjae Oh, Chaeyong Park, Yo-Seb Jeon, and Seungmoon Choi. 2021. Identifying Contact Fingers on Touch Sensitive Surfaces by Ring-Based Vibratory Communication. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '21). ACM, 208–222. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3472749.3474745
FIGURES
(Teaser image) System overview (left). Illustration of an interaction scene and seven recognizable contact finger states (right).
Block diagram for simulating the transmission of vibration across a surface.
Our Hardware for the transmitter and receiver. A user wears two ring-type transmitters (left). A closer look at the flexible rings (middle). A microphone of two commercial devices, a tablet and an earbud, is tested as the receiver (right).
The visualization of data processing.
Confusion matrices in percentage for the two tested places, laboratory and cafe (left). Our decision rule for contact finger identification (right). Note that triple finger touches detected with a single carrier frequency were regarded as wrong instances.
Illustration of four everyday objects and respective receiver positions (left). Mean finger identification accuracies of our system for the four objects (right).
Illustration of our applications. Changing stroke width in our drawing application (left), finger-aware video player (middle), and finger-dependent light switch (right).