Unless you’re wearing specially designed gloves, Apple touchscreen devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches may not respond to a touch by your gloved finger. A newly granted patent (number 10,620,758) shows that the tech giant wants to change this.
In the patent data, Apple notes that touch sensitive devices can be used in environments where an object touching a surface of the touch sensitive device can be separated from the surface by a barrier. For example, a user can be wearing a glove on one or both hands or can have a bandage on one or more fingers.
The barrier can create a separation between the object and sensors of a touch sensor panel and degrade the sensors’ ability to identify the object as touching the surface of the touch sensitive device. Apple wants to change this.
Here’s the summary of the invention: “The dynamic adjusting of the conditions for identifying inputs as touching a touch-sensitive device is discloses. In some examples, in addition to using a signal density make threshold to identify an input patch as touching the surface, a signal density stability threshold can be used to identify the input patch as touching the surface.
“In some examples, a weighted average of peak signal density contributions from recent identified touches can be computed to dynamically adjust the make threshold for new input patches. In other examples, a new input patch identified as associated with the same path as an earlier touch can have its “make” threshold dynamically adjusted based on the earlier touch without computing a weighted average.”
