15th (IEEE) International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS) 2020

2020 IEEE 15th International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS) | 978-1-7281-8524-8/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICIIS51140.2020.9342687

A Magnetic Resonance Coupling Based Touchless

Pad for Human-Computer Interfacing
Vivek Kumar Srivastava
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Ropar, India
vivek.19eez0027@iitrpr.ac.in
Ashwani Sharma
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Ropar, India
ashwani.sharma@iitrpr.ac.in
Ananth Bharadwaj
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology
Ropar, India
2018eez0023@iitrpr.ac.in

Abstract—In this paper, an artificial human interface based
on magnetic resonance coupling is proposed to detect and sense
the direction of movement of a fingertip. The finger movement
is analyzed by recognizing the change in magnetic coupling
observed between a static transmitter coil and a static receiver
coil array due to presence of a small coil resonator placed at the
fingertip. By measuring induce voltage responses in the spatially
distributed receiver coil array, the movement of the resonator
coil is characterized. A commercial software Ansys EM suite 19.1
is utilized to demonstrate applicability of the proposed design.
The fingertip movement is examined by moving the resonator
in various directions and the observed results corroborate the
claims. Therefore, the proposed touchless pad is found well
suitable for infection free accessibility of the computer systems.
Index Terms—Artificial human interface, touchless pad, coil
antenna, magnetic resonant coupling, coil array.
I. I NTRODUCTION
This motivates designers to evolve alternative solution which
are touchless to reduce the risk of infection and provide better
AHI systems.
Several literature works proposed touchless designs to col-
lect input from the user and then process it further to perform
the defined objective. In [6], a vision based software system is
designed to recognize hand gestures using a camera. Similarly,
in [7], a vision based virtual mouse is proposed to sense hand
gestures by using color caps attached on the fingertips. A
digital camera is employed for collecting data which further
processed using an algorithm based on computing software.
In [8], a vision-based hand gesture recognizer for a real-time
environment is proposed to control the motion of a mouse
by tracking finger tips. The major drawback of the vision
based systems is that they are very sensitive to surrounding
conditions like background light, presence of things and their

A RTIFICIAL Human Interface (AHI) has been a promi-

nent area of research nowadays. With the advancement
in technology, it becomes essential that both, the user and
the machine, interact with each other to meet a particular
objective. A good interface provides better way of commu-
nication exchange which leads to a more effective, efficient,
and more accurate guidance for the user. Many approaches
have been investigated to provide communication between
human and computer such as tracking technology [1], [2],
voice recognition [3], eye gesture recognition [4], etc. For
proper interaction between human and computer, it requires
both hardware and software design [5].
A couple decades ago, wired mouse was invented to provide
link between human and computer system. This conventional
method enables us to operate the personal computer easily
and efficiently using a graphical user interface environment.
The evolution of mobile computation technology replaced
the wired mouse with a capacitive touch pad inbuilt within
the laptops. This makes the computer systems small in size
and also handy. An upgrade in technology provided boost in
wireless system over the wired one. This upgrades the wired
mouse into wireless one. The major drawback of these devices
is that they are tangible and can be a cause of infection spread
since the device is not touch free and used by several users.
This work was supported in part by SERB, Department of Science &
Technology, Government of India under Grant ECR/2018/000343.
movements due to which gesture recognition deviates from
accuracy. Moreover, the use of digital camera poses higher
cost of such systems. In contrast, a Lip control AHI is
proposed in [9] designed specially for people facing tetraplegia
problem. Further, in [10], an AHI system is proposed by
combining speech and tongue motion for disabled person.
However, such systems are very complex and may not provide
a comfortable solution for general replacement of computer
mouse. Therefore, a simple comfortable, and cost effective
solution is required for this purpose.
In this paper, we propose a coil antenna based touchless pad
to detect and sense the direction of movement of a fingertip
without any physical connection. The Proposed system is
based on Magnetic Resonant Coupling (MRC) technology
having various advantages due to the use of magnetic coupling.
Among them low latency, cost effectiveness, and less sensitive
to the surrounding material are the prominent features. The
touchless feature provides an infection free usage of the
system. This is achieved by the proposed touchless AHI
system which consist of a transmitter coil (Tx), an array of
receiver coils (Rx) contained within a touchless pad, and a
resonating coil attached to the fingertip. Further, the system
is designed in such a way that the resonator coil attached to
the fingertip requires no complex hardware and represents an
inexpensive and comfortable wearable antenna. Although, the
effect of the fingertip in the region of the coil antenna has a

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 15th (IEEE) International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS) 2020
slight variation in operating frequency and is analyzed in [11].
This frequency change has a minimal effect and ignored in our
case. Hence, a cost effective design for sensing position of the
fingertip is proposed in this work.
Section II presents the proposed touchless system configura-
tion. Section III presents simulation and results to demonstrate
proof of concept. The paper is concluded in Section IV.
II. T HE P ROPOSED MRC BASED T OUCHLESS AHI
S YSTEM
The proposed touchless AHI system consists three sets of
square coil systems named as transmitter coil (Tx), receiver
coil (Rx) array and a resonator coil as shown in Fig. 1. The
Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the proposed touchless pad and AHI system.
Tx and Rx both are contained within the touchless pad having
total size 62×62 mm2 . The touchless pad is realized in planar
technology using a two-sided Printed Circuit Board (PCB) of
FR4 substrate of thickness 1.6 mm, dielectric constant r = 4.4,
loss tangent tanδ = 0.02, and 0.035 mm of copper deposition.
The layout of the proposed touchless pad is presented in Fig 2.
The Tx and the Rx coil array are placed on the opposite layers
of the PCB. The Tx is located at the bottom layer and has a
maximum side length of 62 mm. In contrast, the Rx array
consisting of nine spatially distributed coils are positioned at
the top layer of the PCB to form a 3×3 array as shown in
Fig. 2.
The Rx coil-i is located at (-21, -21), (-21, 0), (-21, 21), (0,
-21), (0, 0), (0, 21), (21, -21), (21, 0) and (21, 21) mm for ∀i ∈
[1, 9], respectively, having side length as 18 mm. Each coil in
the pad has a single turn square structure. The resonator coil
attached to the fingertip is used to enhance excitation of the
Rx coil array in accordance to the position of the fingertip.
The resonator coil has a side length of 20 mm, number of
turns 8, width of conductive strip 0.5 mm, and gap between
the turns as 0.5 mm. While operating, this resonating coil is
located at a certain height h away from the touchless pad and
freely moves with the fingertip above the region of the pad as
demonstrated in Fig 1.
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Fig. 2. Layout of the proposed design (a) Touchless pad, (b) Resonator coil.
When the Tx coil is excited by an alternating current,
magnetic field (H-field) distribution is produced above the pad.
As the Tx and Rx coils are placed very close to each other,
this generates a complex H-field pattern which is difficult to
be evaluated analytically. This complex distribution of the H-
field flux links with the Rx coils to induce a voltage Vind in
the Rx coils. The Vind values in each Rx coil is minimum
when the resonator coil is not present in the vicinity of the
pad.
To track the position of the resonator coil, the proposed
design incorporates a three coil MRC technique. Which in
general consists of a Tx coil, a Rx coil, and a resonator
coil, all resonating on the same operating frequency. In the
MRC, external capacitors are connected in series to resonate
the coils at the operating frequency. In the proposed design,
the Tx and the Rx coils are resonated using series capacitors
CT x , CRx1 to CRx9 at the operating frequency 13.56 MHz
as shown in Fig. 2(a). Further, the resonator coil also has to
resonate properly at 13.56 MHz, hence, a series capacitor Cres
is connected with it and closed the loop as shown in Fig. 2(b).
When the fingertip is away from the pad, the resonator coil
does not influence the coupling and the Vind values in the Rx
coils are not significant. However, when the moving fingertip
is lies within the region of the touchless pad, the resonating
coil initiates altering the magnetic coupling between the Tx
and the Rx coils. The maximum enhancement in the value
of magnetic coupling is obtained for the Rx coil which is
located in close proximity to the resonator coil. This is due to
enhanced coupling in a three coil MRC technique in presence
of the resonator coil. This change in magnetic coupling can
be quantified by observing the pattern of the Vind in the Rx
coils for varying position of the resonator coil. Hence, nine
Vind values are observed which can sampled, digitized and
further processed by computer. As a proof of concept, the
proposed model is designed and simulated in a commercially
used software as explained in the subsequent section.
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 15th (IEEE) International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS) 2020

III. S IMULATION AND R ESULTS

The proposed touchless pad and resonator coil is designed
in Ansys EM suite 19.1. The model with coil dimensions given
in Fig. 2 is realized for simulation. The separation considered
between the proposed touchless pad and the resonator coil is
10 mm for simulations. This designed model is then analyzed
using Ansys Maxwell and later imported in Ansys Simplorer
to perform circuit simulations. The lumped capacitor values
corresponding to the various coils shown in Fig. 2 are extracted 

through simulations. The calculated values of these resonat- 


ing capacitors are CT x = 0.4794nF , CRx1 = 2.0669nF ,


 

CRx2 = 1.8796nF , CRx3 = 1.8933nF , CRx4 = 1.7989nF ,





CRx5 = 1.8811nF , CRx6 = 1.9247nF , CRx7 = 1.9491nF ,


 

CRx8 = 1.8339nF , and CRx9 = 1.9475nF . The corre- 

sponding capacitance value for resonator coil is evaluated as

Cres = 0.1443nF . Fig. 3 shows simplorer model used to



    
  

Fig. 3. Circuit simulation for Vind in the Rx coil array using Ansys Simplorer.
measure Vind in the Rx coil array. The model is now simulated
for various positions of the resonator coil. As the resonator
coil (hence the fingertip) is moved from one position to next,
the variation of Vind values in the Rx coils are measured.
Different patterns of Vind values of nine Rx coils can be
encoded to result in position tracking of the resonator coil.
For proper verification of the proposed design, three paths of
the movement of the fingertip are simulated and results are
presented.
A. Horizontal movement
Fig. 4(a) shows horizontal movement of a fingertip along
x-axis from points Px1 to Px5 . For the resonator coil laying
at these points, Vind values in each Rx coil (Rx1 - Rx9) is
noted. Fig. 4(b) shows the variation of Vind in Rx1 - Rx9
coils for the resonator coil moving from location Px1 to Px5 .
From Fig 4(b), we can observe that, at position Px1 , Vind
in the Rx4 is significantly higher in comparison to the other
Rx coils since the resonator location Px1 lies over the Rx4
perfectly. Now as finger reaches to point Px2 , the Vind in Rx4
reduces and the Vind in Rx5 increases since the resonator lies
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Fig. 4. Horizontal movement (a) Path followed, (b) Vind variation.
in the middle of Rx4 and Rx5 and Vind in other coils are at
minimum. Similarly, as the fingertip moves toward point Px3 ,
the Vind in Rx5 increases further and the Vind in Rx4 reduces
to very small value. For further movement towards Px4 , the
Vind in Rx5 reduces and the Vind in Rx6 increases. Further,
the Vind in Rx6 reaches to maximum when the fingertip is
at point Px5 for which the resonator coil is perfectly aligned
with Rx6.
B. Vertical movement
Fig. 5(a) shows the path consider for vertically moving
fingertip. The path follows along y-axis from points Py1 to
Py5 . The variation in Vind in the Rx coils when fingertip
follows this path is plotted in Fig. 5(b). We can note the
similar variation as observed for the horizontal movement
which shows a good agreement with the path tracking.
C. Random movement
Fig. 6(a) defines the path for the considered random move-
ment. This path consists of points Pr1 to Pr9 . As the number
of observations in this case is large we split the results into two
figures. The former consists of movement results from Pr1 to
Pr5 , whereas, the latter figure contains movement results from
Pr5 to Pr9 . The results corresponding to these points is shown
in Fig. 6(b) and Fig. 6(c) respectively. The variation in the
Vind can be concluded similar to the observations made for
horizontal and vertical movements. Therefore, it is apparent
from the results that even in the random movement case, the
proposed design is able to sense the path location easily. Based
on the data obtained from the results, decision thresholds in the
Vind values are set to predict the movement of the fingertip.
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 15th (IEEE) International Conference on Industrial and Information Systems (ICIIS) 2020

 
  

 
 
   

 

  
  

 


 

 




 
    
        
   

 

 

Fig. 5. Vertical movement (a) Path followed, (b) Vind variation. 


 




A higher separation in the threshold Vind of the Rx coils for




various locations of the resonator coil corresponds to a better

 



accuracy in presence of noise in practice. The results indicate
that the minimum Vind under the case when the resonator coil
is perfectly aligned with a Rx coil is 1.1 V. Further, when 

the resonator coil is placed between two adjacent Rx coils,

the minimum Vind under this case is 0.6 V. Whereas, in all
other coils away from resonators, the maximum Vind level is 
    
  

0.2 V. This represents a good resolution between the threshold
voltages set for decision making in the movement prediction.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a touchless interfacing system is proposed
which incorporates magnetic resonance coupling technique
using multiple coil antennas. Operating at frequency 13.56
MHz, the design is aimed to measure the location and sense the
movement of fingertip on the touchless pad. The touchless pad
consists of the Tx coil and spatially distributed Rx coil array,
and a small resonator coil. The resonator coil is attached at the
finger tip and is in the form of a loop to achieve an inexpensive
and comfortable wearable antenna. When the finger is not in
the vicinity of the touchless pad, the induced voltage values
in the nine Rx coils are at minimum. As soon as the fingertip
moves above the touchless pad, the resonator coil enhances
coupling of the corresponding Rx coil below it. The change
in magnetic coupling is measured as distinct induced voltage
variations in accordance to the movement of the resonator coil.
The separation between distinct voltage variations determines
the decision threshold and affects the accuracy and resolution
of the position prediction. The proposed design was simulated
to validate the claims and induced voltage values in the
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Fig. 6. Random movement (a) Path followed, (b) Vind variation for path
Py1 to Py5 , (c) Vind variation for path Py5 to Py9 .
receiver coils were observed for various movements of the
fingertip. The results showed the voltage values of 1.1V,
0.6V, and 0.2V for the Rx coils which are perfectly aligned,
half-aligned, and misaligned, respectively, with the resonator
coil. This corresponds to a good separation between the
observed voltage values, hence, translates to a better accuracy
of position prediction in presence of noise. Hence, the results
demonstrates that the design can be considered as a potential
candidate for touchless AHI applications.
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