Yuhui Zhao

Yuhui Zhao

A maker, an engineer and a first year PhD student trying to figure out his place in the world. My research interests include mobile and ubiquitous computing, self sustainable sensing and computing, accessibility technologies, and brain-computer interface. My advisor is Dr.Thad Starner, and I also work with Dr. Gregory Abowd

UbiquiTouch: Self sustaining ubiquitous touch interfaces

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2020

We present UbiquiTouch, an ultra low power wireless touch interface. With an average power consumption of 30.91μW, UbiquiTouch can run on energy harvested from ambient light. It achieves this performance through low power touch sensing and passive communication to a nearby smartphone using ambient FM backscatter. This approach allows UbiquiTouch to be deployed in mobile situations both in indoor and outdoor locations, without the need for any additional infrastructure for operation. To demonstrate the potential of this technology, we evaluate it in several different and realistic scenarios. Finally, we address the future application space for this technology.

Authors: Anandghan Waghmare, Qiuyue Xue, Dingtian Zhang, Yuhui Zhao, Shivan Mittal, Nivedita Arora, Ceara Byrne, Thad Starner, Gregory D Abowd

Download paper here —