Is wearable capactive touch impossible?

Projects General Guidance
1

I'm using an MPR121 touch sensor to experiment with wearable electronics after wondering if I could make a touch sensitive sleeve to control say an mp3 player or anything else you might want to try.

The sleeve at the moment is just a length of foil wrapped around the forearm of a long sleeved shirt; this is then connected by wire to the touch sensor, so there is fabric between my arm and the tin foil.

However even having the foil in close proximity to my arm means that it picks up a huge amount of capacitance just from being near and when you do actually touch it the difference in capacitance is too small and too affected by background noise to differentiate between touched or not easily.

Can anyone suggest a way around this or is the idea of a wearable capacitive touch pad an impossibility?

2

Simple but less practical solution: put the second plate onto your finger, with which you touch the other plate.

It may be sufficient to connect the second contact to a conductive bracelet, connected to the activating hand. Then the way from the bracelet to your finger tip is much shorter than through your body to the other plate, and may give sufficiently different capacities when your finger touches the second plate. Just an idea...