Swarun Kumar

TextileSense is a near-field beamforming system which can track everyday objects made of conductive materials (e.g. a human hand) even if they are few tens of centimeters away. Our approach uses multiple flexible NFC coil antennas embedded in ordinary and irregularly shaped surfaces we interact with in smart environments - furniture, carpets, etc. We design and fabricate specialized textile coils woven into the fabric of the furniture and easily hidden by acrylic paint. We then develop a near-field blind beamforming system to efficiently detect surrounding objects. We further use a data-driven approach to infer the locations of the objects. A detailed experimental evaluation of TextileSense shows an average accuracy of 3.5 cm in tracking the location of objects of interest within a few tens of centimeters of the furniture.