In collaboration with Microsoft, researchers at several universities in the United States and China have developed an interactive smart fabric. Dubbed Capacitivo, it can recognise certain devices or even foods placed on its surface, thanks to inbuilt electrodes. It has a variety of potential uses.
Capacitivo is a contact-based object recognition technique developed for interactive fabrics using capacitive sensing. It features a conductive fabric with over 100 electrodes attached to a textile substrate. The smart fabric has already been shown to recognise a sample of several objects, including plastic items, dinnerware and fruit (avocado, kiwi, grapefruit), with 94.5% accuracy.