A gesture-based interaction technique for a passive RFID card with an acceleration sensor

Abstract

Contactless integrated circuit (IC) cards, such as employee ID and prepaid cards, are widely used. However, the contactless IC card is only used for ‘hold over’ operations. Here, we develop AccelTag, a contactless IC card equipped with an acceleration sensor and a liquid crystal display (LCD); we thus extend the functionality of contactless IC cards. AccelTag employs high-function radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology, driving the acceleration sensor and the LCD without a battery. AccelTag supports gestural operations such as slide and flip, and also accepts orientation as an input. We created a prototype of AccelTag and investigated its electrical characteristics and gesture recognition accuracy. The results showed that AccelTag can be used in the range of 3 cm to 15 cm from the reader and that the accuracy of recognizing the slide and flip gesture, and sensing card orientation was 65.8%, 99.2%, and 83.4% accuracy on average, respectively.