Science & Technology

Researchers developed fabric-friendly NFC sensors

Known as TextileSense, this system can track everyday objects made of conductive materials, like a human hand

NFC fabric

Researchers developed fabric-friendly NFC sensors. Source: pexels.com

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Laboratory for Emerging Wireless Technologies have developed fabric-friendly NFC antennas. They can be woven into everyday surfaces for building smart environments.

We achieved this by using multiple flexible NFC coil antennas embedded in ordinary and irregularly shaped surfaces, like furniture and carpets, that we interact with in smart environments
Swarun Kumar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering

The team designed and fabricated specialized textile coils that can be woven into the fabric of the furniture and easily hidden by acrylic paint. By developing a near-field blind beamforming system to efficiently detect surrounding objects, these coils can sense the position of an object, like determining if a human is sitting on the couch or lying down.

TextileSense opens new applications in device tracking and human body posture sensing. Using a data-driven approach to infer the locations of the objects, an experimental evaluation of TextileSense shows an average accuracy of 3.5 cm in tracking the location of objects of interest within a few tens of centimeters of the furniture.

We’ve reported that Canadians can now use an NFC-embedded food containers.

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