Touch & activate: adding interactivity to existing objects using active acoustic sensing

In this paper, we present a novel acoustic touch sensing technique called Touch & Activate. It recognizes a rich context of touches including grasp on existing objects by attaching only a vibration speaker and a piezo-electric microphone paired as a sensor. It provides easy hardware configuration for prototyping interactive objects that have touch input capability. We conducted a controlled experiment to measure the accuracy and trade-off between the accuracy and number of training rounds for our technique. From its results, per-user recognition accuracies with five touch gestures for a plastic toy as a simple example and six hand postures for the posture recognition as a complex example were 99.6% and 86.3%, respectively. Walk up user recognition accuracies for the two applications were 97.8% and 71.2%, respectively. Since the results of our experiment showed a promising accuracy for the recognition of touch gestures and hand postures, Touch & Activate should be feasible for prototype interactive objects that have touch input capability.