DropleX: Liquid sensing on tablet touchscreens

Abstract: 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 to detect whether a drink has been spiked or if a sealed liquid has been contaminated. 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. Our system achieves 96-99% accuracy in detecting microliter-scale adulteration in soda, wine, and milk, 93-96% accuracy in threshold detection of trace chemical concentrations, and 86-96% accuracy in through-container adulterant detection. Given the predominance of touchscreens, these exploratory results can open new opportunities for liquid sensing on everyday devices.