Distinguishing Users With Capacitive Touch Communication

As the people are surrounded by an ever-larger variety of post-PC devices, the traditional methods for identifying and authenticating users have become cumbersome and time-consuming. In this paper, the authors present a capacitive communication method through which a device can recognize who is interacting with it. This method exploits the capacitive Touchscreens, which are now used in laptops, phones, and tablets, as a signal receiver. The signal that identifies the user can be generated by a small transmitter embedded into a ring, watch, or other artifact carried on the human body. They explore two example system designs with a low-power continuous transmitter that communicates through the skin and a signet ring that needs to be touched to the screen.