The MIDAS touch: Thermal dissipation resulting from everyday interactions as a sensing modality

We contribute MIDAS as a novel sensing solution for characterizing everyday objects using thermal dissipation. MIDAS takes advantage of the fact that anytime a person touches an object it results in heat transfer. By capturing and modeling the dissipation of the transferred heat, e.g., through the decrease in the captured thermal radiation, MIDAS can characterize the object and determine its material. We validate MIDAS through extensive empirical benchmarks and demonstrate that MIDAS offers an innovative sensing modality that can recognize a wide range of materials – with up to 83% accuracy – and generalize to variations in the people interacting with objects. We also demonstrate that MIDAS can detect thermal dissipation through objects, up to 2 mm thickness, and support analysis of multiple objects that are interacted with.