Article’s

This paper presents AirTouch, a touchless human-computer interaction (HCI) system that leverages Time-of-Flight (TOF) range sensors to detect mid-air finger gestures and translate them into precise click and hover events on connected devices. The growing reliance on shared digital interfaces has underscored the need for hygienic, surface-independent interaction modalities. AirTouch addresses this gap by fusing TOF-based depth sensing with real-time gesture recognition algorithms—including Kalman filtering, histogram-based noise reduction, and machine learning classification—to achieve sub-5 ms latency with millimetre-level spatial accuracy. The proposed architecture encompasses sensor fusion, microcontroller-driven signal processing, and cross-platform communication interfaces (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi). Comparative analysis of proximity sensing technologies reveals that TOF sensors offer the optimal balance between accuracy (~1 mm/cm), latency (1–5 ms), power consumption (20–200 mA), and cost (₹700–₹10,500). AirTouch targets deployment in healthcare, retail, education, and public infrastructure environments, with implications for hygiene enhancement, accessibility, and novel interaction paradigms. The system was prototyped using an Arduino Uno R3, infrared proximity sensors, and a Python/TensorFlow Lite/Flutter software stack running on Windows 11.