Welcome To Hi-Tech Bathrooms

From mirrors that don't fog to intelligent water closets to sustainable showers, bathrooms are fast becoming hi-tech

- Smita Tripathi

IMAGINE GOING TO THE toilet in the morning and as you sit down comfortably for your daily ablutions, your phone pings. “Your diet seems unbalanced. The recommended recipe is: 'Salmon/Chicken Avocado Salad.” No, the message is not from your nutritionist, but from your toilet. Yes, that's right, your toilet doubles up as a health monitoring device. Welcome to the future where your toilet does the talking.

Japan-based Toto presented the Wellness Toilet concept at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, giving us a glimpse into the bathroom of the future. Using“multiple cutting-edge sensing technologies”, each time a person sits on the toilet, it will track and analyse a person's “mental and physical status”, says the company. This data will then be sent to an app to provide users with recommendations. Of course, this is still a prototype and probably years away from commercial manufacturing.

However, bathrooms today are pretty hi-tech. “After kitchens, if there's an area big on technological advancements, it is the bathroom space. Countries such as Japan and the US were already using hi-tech toilets but recently, we have seen this trend pick up in our home ground too,” says Payal Bagzai, Head of Design at Livspace, a home interiors company.

From sensor-or touch-operated taps and shower systems to intelligent toilet seats with automated seat covers that open and close pre-and post-usage to automated spritzer wands, there is enough tech in the bathroom to get a geek excited.