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
Yeah I know, but is it necessary to give bt connections to everything?
Wait till they load it with ‘AI.’
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.
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.
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?
There’ll probably be a little box somewhere in that toilet I assume that controls all of the urinals there that is networked.
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.
This makes we want to buy a bunch of Bluetooth stickers and stick them in random objects
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.
To alert staff when customers have eaten the cake and it needs to be replenished
Cheaper than running plumbing through the walls
