Investigations on the Leakage Effect in Capacitive Sensing

In the measurement of mutual capacitance between electrodes both the coupling and the leakage effect contribute to the measurement result whereas the leakage mode is dominant in the self capacitance mode. While the coupling effect is mainly defined by the geometry and material distribution close to the electrodes, the root cause or modulation of the leakage effect may be far away from the electrode. It is shown that utilizing both effects may lead to an improvement of an ECT-like scenario reconstruction performance in open environments (e.g. pretouch applications).