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Nintendo has revealed that it plans to develop ‘quality of life’ technology, including a sleep and fatigue sensor.
The device will sit by the user’s bedside and track body movement, breathing and heart rate. It will then upload the data to the cloud for analysis and give the user a visual indication of their sleep condition and fatigue status.
"Everyone needs to sleep, and all of us get tired. There is no argument that whether or not we have sound sleep or not significantly affects our health, and many of us recognise through our daily lives that accumulated fatigue makes it difficult to maintain good health,” said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata in a briefing to investors.
“However, we tend to recognise these conditions in a subjective fashion. Fatigue and sleep are themes that are rather hard to visualise in more objective ways. At Nintendo, we believe that if we could visualise them, there would be great potential for many people regardless of age, gender, language or culture.”
Nintendo outlined five conditions that the device has to meet before it’s ready. The first of which is that it should be ‘non-wearable’.
“If we need to wear a device, say, on our wrist, or if we need to install some special equipment in our bed, we will sometimes forget, which therefore makes it hard to continue. Thus, I believe the ‘non-wearable’ concept is very important,” explained Iwata.
The other conditions include ‘non-contact’, ‘non-operating’, ‘non-waiting’, and ‘non-installation efforts’.
There is no word on pricing on release date yet, but one of the slides in the briefing does suggest that the platform may be underway by 2016.
