According to their website, it is so the toilet can be paired to a Sanela control app which apparently can be used to control certain functional aspects of the urinal, as well as gives quick access to user manuals
Now if only we could find a way to hack this app, so that the toilet plays “It’s Raining Men” every time it flushes… Now that would really be something
Bluetooth is a questionable choice unless the company also offered some kind of network appliance that incorporates connections in a cheaper way than all units being networked. Allowing the hub, as a serviceable component, to provide additional monitoring and functionality without requiring each unit to also contain the components. There’s certainly reasons, not outlandish either, but who knows?
I could honestly see the appeal of a way for the toilet to analyze your poop and tell you that you should be eating more fiber or that you need to see a doctor because it’s seen X, Y, and Z symptoms. It’s like the joke about German toilets being so you can monitor your health, but with much less of the nastiness.
Of course, we can’t have nice things and you’ll just get ads for Metamucil or the colorectal-cancer-from microplastics law firms in the style of mesothelioma lawyers.
One very cool thing would be a urinal that does internal health checks on your piss and allows you to access that on your phone. But yeah bluetooth is a shit choice for that too.
My main concern every time these health-sensing toilets come up (it’s a topic on everyone’s mind, ya know?) is how long until they start associating waste with the people it comes from, and then forwarding that info on to entities like insurance companies? I’d be too paranoid to use these in public bathrooms, and if I had one at home I’d be doing the usual IoT best practices - keep it on it’s own network with no internet access.
Yeah i didnt really specify that but i had the same thought. For a user its impossible to assess, whether its offline or not, so it will never be an acceptable system for public toilets.
Seeing as they could accomplish basically the same thing with an indicator and a QR code, its crazy a bt chip and antenna were both used in this. My only remaining question: how is it powered?
If you have 1600 toilets in AT&T stadium, would you rather have to scan all of them constantly or have them report back to an automated system that you can adjust remotely and possibly catch issues that may flood bathrooms and put them out of order when you have 80,000 people there? Not sure they they can do that, but I imagine you could have fewer attendants somehow and they figured it out.
The stadium has WiFi as well, and 5ghz nor 2.4ghz signals could reach all of the building, they would all have to be networked back into devices/ software designed for it. So according to your numbers you would need to mesh 250bt receivers into a network running to their specialized software
Was it necessary to take the picture while looking the person in the eye at the urinal next to you while they were attempting to have a non anxiety ridden moment forcing them to not be able to pee?
Serious answer: it’s a “smart” urinal, in that it can report usage statistics, alert maintenance staff to problems, and be remotely controlled.
If you’re in the facilities maintenance business, Bluetooth-enabled equipment can be a good way to get an operational technology network up and running without a lot of costly retrofit.
Unserious Answer: it counts the fluid as it passes, because the last counting guy kept getting the count wrong and so people would grossly overpay/underpay when they used the urinal
For many things. For IR or heat activated urinals you can set the sensitivity when they actuate, the flush volume, schedule regular cleaning cycles, and see statistics of usage, with some models remaining battery power, etc
When you are a maintenance guy in an office building with 100+ of these bad boys it helps a lot.
You mean PeeTube? PeeTube is also the name of the astronaut pee device based pee device that doesn’t need video to measure your penis length. Simply insert your penis into the spring loaded tube (it’s just a tube with lots of springs in it). As your penis skin touches the springs, the penis length is measured. The current model is a 256SpT (Springs per Tube), which allows for a penis length resolution in 12"/256 increments.
The difference in usage that badboy would get during a football game versus a gig at the same stadium would be enormous. Things like flush cycle frequency and when to turn the system on/off to conserve water. Nothing massively sinister - boring facility management stuff mostly.