FaceSense

Abstract

Face touch is an unconscious human habit. Frequent touching of sensitive/mucosal facial zones (eyes, nose, and mouth) increases health risks by passing pathogens into the body and spreading diseases. Furthermore, accurate monitoring of face touch is critical for behavioral intervention. Existing monitoring systems only capture objects approaching the face, rather than detecting actual touches. As such, these systems are prone to false positives upon hand or object movement in proximity to one's face (e.g., picking up a phone). We present FaceSense, an ear-worn system capable of identifying actual touches and differentiating them between sensitive/mucosal areas from other facial areas. Following a multimodal approach, FaceSense integrates low-resolution thermal images and physiological signals. Thermal sensors sense the thermal infrared signal emitted by an approaching hand, while physiological sensors monitor impedance changes caused by skin deformation during a touch. Processed thermal and physiological signals are fed into a deep learning model (TouchNet) to detect touches and identify the facial zone of the touch. We fabricated prototypes using off-the-shelf hardware and conducted experiments with 14 participants while they perform various daily activities (e.g., drinking, talking). Results show a macro-F1-score of 83.4% for touch detection with leave-one-user-out cross-validation and a macro-F1-score of 90.1% for touch zone identification with a personalized model.

FaceTouch: Detecting hand-to-face touch with supervised contrastive learning to assist in tracing infectious diseases

“…Similarly, A wearable system has been introduced to avoid unconscious face touches relying on accelerometer data and a deep learning approach to classify hand movement [ 4 ]. On the other hand, [ 2 ] used an ear-worn device and developed a method to detect hand touches and identify the types of hand touches to mucosal and non-mucosal areas by relying on thermal infrared and physiological signals determining changes caused by the skin when a face is touched.…”

“…Humans have an innate habit of touching their faces [ 1 , 2 ]. Touching sensitive/mucosal face zones (eyes, nose, and mouth) frequently increases health risks by introducing microorganisms into the body and spreading disease [ 3 , 4 ].…”

Application of Anti-wear Technology for Water-cooled Wall of CFB Boilers

“…If only wear is considered, heat transfer will be affected. These issues need to be further optimised in future studies to determine the optimum operating conditions [13][14].…”