EM-Sense, a technology developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research for automatically identifying an electrical or electromagnetic device that a person is touching, is the student category winner of Fast Company magazine's prestigious Innovation by Design Awards.

The technology was invented by a team that included Gierad Laput and Robert Xiao, both Ph.D. students in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Other team members are Chris Harrison, assistant professor in the HCII; and Alanson Sample and Chouchang Yang of Disney Research.

EM-Sense could enable smartwatches to automatically recognize what objects users are touching — for instance, whether the wearer is using a laptop, operating a saw or riding a motorcycle — creating new opportunities for context-aware apps. Using the user's body as an antenna, the technology is able to differentiate between scores of objects based on the ambient electromagnetic noise they emit.

The Innovation by Design Awards program, now in its fifth year, honors the most innovative and disruptive design solutions to today's business problems. This year's judging panel selected the finalists from more than 1,700 international submissions across 11 categories. All of the finalists are highlighted in the October issue of Fast Company.