The healthy home of the future

Hitachi, Matsushita Electric and a consortium of other firms have started work on a system of wirelessly networked devices that watch your health as you go about your daily business, with the intention of catching health problems in their early stages. Hitachi is making a mat that slides under your futon and measures pulse, breathing, and snoring while you're asleep; Matsushita is working on an unspecified device that allows the "easy measurement of the thickness of flab on your stomach and other areas" (a networked pair of calipers?), Toto will bring out a toilet that measures salt and sugar levels in your urine as you piss; and Mitsubishi is working on a system that analyses the data, while Fujitsu Prime Software Technologies contributes the communication format that will link everything up. These should start appearing on the market around 2006.

[Via Nikkei IT (Japanese)]