Reducing Driver Distraction and Improving Safety with 'Pre-Touch' in Future Automotive HMI Systems

该项目将开发电容式触摸屏的预触控传感，使其在汽车和工业应用中有用，以帮助提高其安全使用，并开辟与触摸屏交互的新的创新方式。在车辆行驶过程中使用电容式触摸屏是一项挑战，因为手指难以准确定位，会导致驾驶员分心。如果感应距离足够远，在用户触摸之前放大显示或预测弹出二级菜单可以显著提高可用性。一些车辆已经使用红外传感器阵列实现了该技术的基本版本，但这种技术价格昂贵，难以实现，并且限制了工业设计的选择。利用电容式触摸屏的电场来检测接近的手或手指的潜力已经被发现了好几年，但由于性能限制（需要测量阿法拉量级的电容变化），该技术从未成功部署。基于采用新颖技术概念的新型测量IC， TouchNetix将通过探索IC，传感器，显示器和其他系统硬件之间的复杂相互作用来研究预触控的系统方面，以延长并最大限度地提高手指在屏幕前可以检测到的距离。一个完整的演示系统将被开发出来，该系统有望在10-20厘米外检测到一只接近的手，并在5-10厘米外给出准确的手指位置。汽车、工业和医疗市场将受益于这项技术，从而开发出更安全、更新颖的人机界面系统和应用。

This project will develop pre-touch sensing for capacitive touchscreens to the point where it is useful for automotive and industrial applications to help improve their safe use and to open up new and innovative ways to interact with a touchscreen.Using a capacitive touchscreen in a vehicle can be challenging while the vehicle is in motion as accurate finger positioning is difficult, leading to driver distraction. Zooming the display before the user touches or predictively popping up secondary menus can significantly help usability if the sensing distance is far enough away. Some vehicles already have rudimentary versions of the technology enabled using IR sensor arrays but this is expensive, hard to implement and limits industrial design options.The potential to use the electric fields from a capacitive touchscreen to detect an approaching hand or finger has been known for several years but due to performance limitations (the need to measure changes in capacitance on the order of atto-farads) the technology has never been successfully deployed.Based on a new measurement IC which uses novel technology concepts, TouchNetix will research the system aspects of pre-touch by exploring the complex interactions between IC, sensor, display and other system hardware to extend and maximise the distance at which a finger can be detected in front of the screen.A complete demonstration system will be developed which it is hoped will routinely detect an approaching hand from 10-20cm away and which gives accurate finger positions 5-10cm away from the touchscreen.Automotive, industrial and medical markets will benefit from the technology, allowing safer and novel HMI systems and applications to be developed.