Touchscreen communication (ToSCom): Electro-Quasistatic body communication during touch sensing

Touchscreens are a fundamental technology for human society providing the primary gateway for human-machine interaction. Today's touchscreens can only be used to detect touch and provide the location of the user's touch input but not to simultaneously communicate digital data during a touch event through the touchscreen. If communication through a touchscreen can be enabled, it promises deep societal impact by augmenting the most popular Human-Computer-Interaction interface with new possibilities such as a single application on the same device opening up personalized user-specific account data depending on the person interacting with the application. Leveraging advances in Electro-Quasistatic field based communication in the past decade, we propose and demonstrate Touchscreen Communication (ToSCom), a high-speed (>Mbps) simultaneous communication and touch sensing interface. We develop a low path loss channel across the entire touchscreen surface enabling 3 Mbps data rate communication with an average bit-error-rate of less than 5 × 10^-7 through the touchscreen surface simultaneously during touch sensing. ToSCom enables a wide range of possibilities in day-to-day life like in wearable devices like transactions in a Point-of-Sale system, audio/image file transfer, and viewing personalized data in touchscreen kiosks.