The Touch Headphones are meant for portable music players and aim to present an improvement to the conventional remote control in the headphone wire, and a solution for controls on wireless inear type headphones. Two capacitive touch sensors per earpiece sense when earpieces are being tapped on, and being put in or out.

The Touch Headphones are a solution for providing playback and volume controls on in-ear type headphones. One of the issues with placing controls on earpieces is that applied pressure is transferred to the inner ear, which potentially creates discomfort. The experiment described in this short paper shows that conventional button switches are not well accepted. Users preferred to operate a button on an earpiece with a force of around 85 grams.