TouchFusion: Multimodal Wristband Sensing for Ubiquitous Touch Interactions

Eric Whitmire, Evan Strasnick, Roger Boldu, Raj Sodhi, Nathan Godwin, Shiu Ng, Andre Levi, Amy Karlson, Ran Tan, Josef Faller, Emrah Adamey, Hanchuan Li, Wolf Kienzle, Hrvoje Benko

arXiv, 2026.

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TouchFusion is a wristband that enables touch interactions on nearby surfaces without any additional instrumentation or computer vision. TouchFusion combines surface electromyography (sEMG), bioimpedance, inertial, and optical sensing to capture multiple facets of hand activity during touch interactions. Through a combination of early and late fusion, TouchFusion enables stateful touch detection on both environmental and body surfaces, simple surface gestures, and tracking functionality for contextually adaptive interfaces as well as basic trackpad-like interactions. We validate our approach on a dataset of 100 participants, significantly exceeding the population size of typical wearable sensing studies to capture a wider variance of wrist anatomies, skin conductivities, and behavioral patterns. We show that TouchFusion can enable several common touch interaction tasks. Using TouchFusion, a wearer can summon a trackpad on any surface, control contextually adaptive interfaces based on where they tap, or use their palm as an always-available touch surface. When paired with smart glasses or augmented reality devices, TouchFusion enables a ubiquitous, contextually adaptive interaction model.