IconoclasT wrote:
] From this week's chapter of the WTF dept....
]
] Yamato house industrial corporation in collaboration with
] TOTO Ltd. corporation will start selling the toilet of the
] future from April 5th onwards.
] Aside from the regular functions, you can also check your
] health status with 4 parameters:
]
] -glucose level in your urine
] -blood pressure
] -fat precentage in the body
] -weight
]
] Needless to say that all this information can be transferred
] to your PC.

another example of something that seems to be clearly WTF, but is in actuality, genius.

Biometric monitoring is a key field that is rapidly accelerating and offers unprecedented benefits for managing health worldwide. With the nurse shortage, inefficiency of health care systems worldwide, and the impending baby boomer generation entering an end of life phase globally, we will need to have some kind of infratructure to manage and monitor people's health. This is one such way.

Why would biometric monitoring be so important? Think about managing anything. You need numbers, real metrics, to know whether you're hitting a target or beyond a desired threshold. How are you going to manage your diabetes if you don't know what your blood glucose is? If you think about it, as a society, we invest billions of dollars monitoring things like stocks, or sports teams, and we don't even monitor our own bodies. Imagine the collective increase in world health if we had the infrastructure to monitor our vitals. That's why virtually all athletes use some form of biometric monitoring during training. That's why people who use biometric monitoring devices at all are 7 times more likely to not be heavy utilizers of the healthcare system.

There are many potential form factors that can offer this, including cell phone, traditional scale, beds, kiosks, and implantable devices like pacemakers and defibrilators. But the toilet ranks as one of the best. You use it at least once a day. You have to make skin to device contact. It can be located virtually anywhere. It is already connected to existing infrastructure (plumbing). It can take advanced biometrics like lipids, tox screens, blood, dna, and fiber panels. And it requires next to no change in behavior on the part of the user (unlike almost every other device).

The downside is that it is not portable (really), and that it's unlikely to replace existing infrastructure (how often do you replace a toilet?). But as a form factor in biometric monitoring, it's in the top 3 for sure.