Tag: toilet

• Kompotoi

  

  Portable toilets are needed on every construction site, and in lots of other places too. Generally speaking, though, they are not pleasant spaces. But that doesn’t seem to be the case in Switzerland. I just discovered a Swiss company called Kompotoi. They make high-quality portable toilets out of spruce, and they have made a commitment to composting as much human waste as possible.

  But the really unique feature that I had never seen before is that each toilet comes equipped with a bin of wood shavings (“litter”), which you are supposed to sprinkle over your poop once you’re done. This serves two important functions. One, it dries out the waste which greatly reduces any smells. I can attest that the toilet I used smelt just fine. And two, doesn’t it just look better to go into a toilet and see wood shavings as opposed to poop?

  This might be an instance of “yeah, only in Switzerland.” The retail price for their classic toilet model is CHF 5,966. That works out to about C$9,500 once you covert it to our painfully weak dollar.

  2024.09.03

• New Wellness Toilet by Toto will analyze your poop

  

  Toto announced a new product this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) called the Wellness Toilet. It won’t be available to consumers for at least several years, but the plan is for it to do two key things to improve overall health and wellness. It will scan your body when you sit on it and it will analyze your poop. (Not urine?) It will then make recommendations via your smartphone about how you might start to make better life decisions. Presumably this will include being more active and eating better. This, to me, feels like an obvious way to innovate around the toilet. If it were available today and it actually worked, I would likely be an early adopter. Either way, I look forward to hopefully including this in future development projects.

  Here’s more about the product from Toto’s press release:

  The WELLNESS TOILET uses multiple cutting-edge sensing technologies to support consumers’ wellness by tracking and analyzing their mental and physical status. Each time the individual sits on the WELLNESS TOILET, it scans their body and its key outputs, then provides recommendations to improve their wellness. There is no additional action needed, so people can easily check their wellness throughout their daily routine, every time they take a bathroom break. They will see their current wellness status and receive wellness-improvement recommendations on a dashboard in an app on their smartphones.

  The residential bathroom is the perfect place to support people’s wellness for a variety of reasons. First, although there are a number of other products that track individuals’ wellness (e.g., wearable devices), it is more convenient to monitor and analyze the body as a part of the everyday routine act of using the WELLNESS TOILET, to which individuals are accustomed. Second, toilets and people have two unique touchpoints that cannot be found elsewhere – the skin and human waste. The WELLNESS TOILET is in direct contact with individuals’ skin when they are sitting on it, and it analyzes the waste they deposit — a wealth of wellness data can be collected from fecal matter.

  Image: Toto

  2021.01.15