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

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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.