Exploring the Use of Capacitive Sensing to Externally Measure Liquid Level in Fluid Containers

Abstract

One potential way to track or infer the amount of intake of different fluids—ranging from water to caffeinated beverages as well as liquid medication—is to determine the level of these fluids in the containers from which the user may consume them. To do so, we propose four capacitive sensor designs that can be easily added to the outside of containers of different shapes and sizes. Our evaluation of these four sensor designs with containers made of different materials (i.e., ceramic, glass, paper, plastic) show that a multi-layer perceptron model can be learned to accurately predict liquid level with correlation coefficients higher than 0.98 and relative absolute error less than 16%. We then demonstrate that a prototype of this sensor can be constructed and affixed at the bottom of a liquid medication bottom to measure the amount of liquid medication in it