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，以帮助汽车和工业应用提高其安全性，并开辟与触摸屏互动的新的创新方式。在车辆行驶时使用电容式触摸屏可能具有挑战性，因为难以准确定位手指，导致司机分心。如果感知距离足够远，在用户触摸之前缩放显示或预测性地弹出二级菜单可以极大地帮助可用性。一些车辆已经有了使用红外传感器阵列的技术的初级版本，但这是昂贵的，难以实现的，并且限制了工业设计选择。使用电容触摸屏的电场来检测接近的手或手指的潜力已经被知道了几年，但由于性能限制(需要测量电容的变化在一个阿特法拉的数量级)，该技术从未被成功实施。基于一种使用新技术概念的新的测量IC，TouchNetix将通过探索IC、传感器、显示器和其他系统硬件，以延长和最大限度地延长手指在屏幕前可以被检测到的距离。将开发一个完整的演示系统，希望该系统能够常规地检测到10-20厘米外的手，并给出距离触摸屏5-10厘米的准确手指位置。汽车、工业和医疗市场将从这项技术中受益，从而开发出更安全和新颖的HMI系统和应用程序。

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.