DropleX: Liquid sensing on tablet touchscreens

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Siqi, Goel, Mayank, Chan, Justin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Siqi
Goel, Mayank
Chan, Justin
author_facet Zhang, Siqi
Goel, Mayank
Chan, Justin
contents We present DropleX, the first system that enables liquid sensing using the capacitive touchscreen of commodity tablets. DropleX detects microliter-scale liquid samples, and performs non-invasive, through-container measurements for liquid analysis. These capabilities are made possible by a physics-informed mechanism that disables the touchscreen's built-in adaptive filters, originally designed to reject the effects of liquid drops such as rain, without any hardware modifications. We model the touchscreen's sensing capabilities, limits, and non-idealities to inform the design of a signal processing and learning-based pipeline for liquid sensing. Under controlled laboratory conditions, our system achieves 89-99% accuracy in detecting microliter-scale adulteration in soda, wine, and milk, 94-96% accuracy in threshold detection of trace chemical concentrations, and 86-96% accuracy in through-container adulterant detection. These exploratory results demonstrate the potential of repurposing commodity touchscreens as a liquid characterization platform for laboratory settings, food and beverage testing, and chemical analysis applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_02694
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DropleX: Liquid sensing on tablet touchscreens
Zhang, Siqi
Goel, Mayank
Chan, Justin
Human-Computer Interaction
We present DropleX, the first system that enables liquid sensing using the capacitive touchscreen of commodity tablets. DropleX detects microliter-scale liquid samples, and performs non-invasive, through-container measurements for liquid analysis. These capabilities are made possible by a physics-informed mechanism that disables the touchscreen's built-in adaptive filters, originally designed to reject the effects of liquid drops such as rain, without any hardware modifications. We model the touchscreen's sensing capabilities, limits, and non-idealities to inform the design of a signal processing and learning-based pipeline for liquid sensing. Under controlled laboratory conditions, our system achieves 89-99% accuracy in detecting microliter-scale adulteration in soda, wine, and milk, 94-96% accuracy in threshold detection of trace chemical concentrations, and 86-96% accuracy in through-container adulterant detection. These exploratory results demonstrate the potential of repurposing commodity touchscreens as a liquid characterization platform for laboratory settings, food and beverage testing, and chemical analysis applications.
title DropleX: Liquid sensing on tablet touchscreens
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02694