Researchers unveil fabric-friendly NFC sensors

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the US have developed fabric-friendly NFC sensors that can be woven into the surface of everyday objects such as cushions and pillows.

The sensors can be deployed in a near-field beamforming system known as TextileSense that can track everyday objects made of conductive materials, like a human hand and be used for a variety of functions, such as finding lost objects and controlling devices through gesture recognition.

Using a data-driven approach to infer the locations of the objects, an experimental evaluation of TextileSense shows an average accuracy of 3.5cm in tracking the location of objects of interest within a few tens of centimetres of the furniture.

The researchers go on to describe how the system can be used to sense two classes of objects — tagged non-conductive objects, such as NFC-enabled credit cards and key fobs, whose identity and location can be obtained and untagged conductive objects, such as human hands and metallic objects, whose presence and location can be identified..