Toilet of the Future

BBC News | HEALTH | Stay healthy with the toilet ‘doctor’

I don’t often get excited about toilets, unless of course we’re talking about my incinerating toilet, but an English company has dared to do the unthinkable – combine a waste removal device with an automated diagnostician. Or some such thing. Dear readers, please direct your rapt attention to the Versatile Interactive Pan.

Okay, so maybe on the surface it looks like a Kevlar diaper or an uncomfortable Sumo wrestler’s loincloth, but this device is full of technology for measuring what users were full of.

Although the device is still just in the concept phase, the promise of getting access within five years to a voice activated toilet seat and an instant analysis of my urine and stool samples has me already trying to figure out how to rip out the current, woefully outdated toilet that was installed at my house just 68 years ago. Of course, the incinerating toilet stays at the cabin, though I wish it didn’t dim the streetlights every time someone uses it.

I’m a bit worried about the following quote, though.

[Spokesman] Mr Wooliscroft went on: “We also want to link to the local supermarket. If, for example, a person is short on roughage one day, an order of beans or pulses will be sent from the VIP to the supermarket and delivered that same day.”

First, let’s ignore the fact that I have absolutely no clue what pulses are, but I’m not sure I want to receive them to solve an inadvertent roughage shortage. It sounds kind of painful. No, the bigger concern is that this quote implies a significant disconnect from reality. If this is what passes for serious thinking at Twyford Bathrooms, then I’ll go ahead and give up now on them ever being able to deliver to me a working version of my dream toilet of the future.

[via Good Morning Silicon Valley]