Eliminating the ground reference for wireless electric field sensing

Abstract

Capacitive systems are getting more and more attention these days. But many systems today like smart-phone screens, laptops, and non-mechanical buttons use capacitive techniques to measure events within several centimeters of distance. The reason that battery-powered devices don’t have high measurement ranges lies in the principle of capacitive measurement itself - the electrical ground is an inherent part of the measurement. In this paper, we present a method for passive and wireless capacitive systems to eliminate the reference to ground. This bears a couple of advantages for mobile, battery-powered capacitive sensor designs in the field of ambient intelligence. We compare the detection range of normal passive capacitive systems with our new approach. The results show that our improvements result in a higher detection range and higher power efficiency.