If stepping on the bathroom scales is enough to fill you with dread, things are about to get a lot harder.
An abundance of smart bathroom products that analyse your heart, body, mind — and urine — will be released this year.
Body Scan from Withings, a French company, is a scale (£350 plus subscription) that can give you an ECG, plus readings on body composition, metabolic rate and nerve health.
Withings is also releasing the U-scan (£449 plus subscription), a smart device for the toilet that can do a urine analysis to test your hydration, nutrition, menstrual cycles and spot early markers for kidney stones. If you share the loo, it can detect who is sitting on it. Vivoo, a urine testing company founded by female scientists, has also developed a similar attachment for toilet seats.
For health obsessives and data junkies, of course, this is progress.
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Withings will also release the BeamO “multiscope” that is a thermometer, electrocardiogram, oximeter and stethoscope, one device rolled into one to monitor your vital signs.
Baracoda, also a French company, unveiled its new AI smart mirror this year called the BMind, that acts as a mental health coach. It analyses your expressions, gestures and tone to determine your mood and offers advice, meditations, breathing exercises, light and sounds to help you cope with the day ahead. The company has no release date yet for the product. The NuraLogix MagicMirror, a similar device, promises to calculate 100 health readings from a 30-second scan.
The list of connected bathroom devices is as long as your arm: voice activated controls for your shower and lighting, smart taps and shower heads to help conserve water. Why is all this happening?
Brian Comiskey, senior director of innovation and trends at the Consumer Technology Association, sees a merging of developments. “When I think about bathroom tech, I think of it as the convergence of a few sector trends in general. It’s health tech, smart home tech, lifestyle tech and sometimes beauty tech too, when you think about smart mirrors.
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“They’re all following this arc that you could ascribe three words to which are: personalised, accessible and intelligent.”
Putting so much health information in the hands of a company can come with privacy risks, however. The Information Commissioner’s Office issued a warning to consumers in December about connected devices.
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The watchdog said “don’t switch off during setup” and use privacy controls to protect your data. An investigation from Which? last year found that washing machines and security cameras were “spying” on consumers by collecting more data than necessary.
Researchers at the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organisation, said “Withings is pretty good at privacy” when they looked at the Body Scan for their “privacy not included” guide. That was not the case for a similar product, the Eufy Smart Scale, which, the researchers said, raised “a few red flags for us on the privacy front, so here’s hoping all your visceral fat data stays private!”
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One device that drew attention at CES, the consumer tech show in Las Vegas in January, was the voice-activated toilet by Kohler, a US manufacturer. The PureWash E390 is a $2,149 bidet seat that attaches to your lavatory, so you activate the spray, warm air dryer and UV clearing features using your phone (no touching!).
One remote-controlled toilet/bidet, the £2,500 Catalona Cataclean, is becoming popular, according to one retailer. “I do very well with them,” said Craig Ditchburn, a sales representative from UK Bathroom Warehouse in Oxford. “A lot of people are going down the route where they don’t want to use toilet paper. It’s environmentally friendly.”
Depending on where you sit on the issue, it’s all either a leap forward or a way to flush your money away.
