Kohler’s ‘Stillness Infinity Experience’ bathtub has tech aimed to create a spa feeling at home. Photo: KOHLER

By Sarah Paynter
Wall Street Journal
April 9, 2024

It’s the year 2034. You wake up and head to the bathroom. First, an alert from your toilet—you’re dehydrated—better remember to take the water bottle to work. The mirror over your sink advises you to apply your prescription cream. Next, step into the shower—it glows with infrared light, designed to soothe inflammation. 

Tech-driven bathrooms could be common in many high-end U.S. homes in the next decade, with postpandemic wellness concerns helping drive the trend, designers and tech executives say. Smart bathroom tech is already used in top hospitals, hotels and some ultraluxury homes in China, says Thomas Serval, co-founder and chief executive of Baracoda, a French company that specializes in internet-connected health technology.

Advanced technology for bathrooms could alleviate burdens on the healthcare system and help aging populations stay longer in their homes, says Steve Scheer, president of Brondell, a San Francisco-based home-technology company.

Yet privacy is also a concern: Do people really want their time in the bathroom monitored and analyzed? 

Here’s a look at the tech that could be coming to your bathroom.

Flush with health

In the coming years, homeowners will be looking for toilets with more features, like urinalysis and self-cleaning capabilities, says Bill Darcy, global president and CEO of the National Kitchen & Bath Association. Homeowners are increasingly giving priority to health and wellness in home design since the pandemic, he says. Health applications are among the innovations companies in Japan, Silicon Valley and France are working on.

Toilets in the near future will be able to detect a variety of conditions, such as urinary tract infections and kidney issues, using built-in chemical-activated tests, says Vik Kashyap, CEO of San Francisco-based Toi Labs, a maker of smart-toilet technology. 

A smart toilet seat from Toi Labs has technology that can monitor for potential signs of illness and disease. PHOTO: TOI LABS

In some senior-living facilities, toilet seats with downward-pointing cameras already use artificial intelligence from Toi Labs to monitor urine and stools for potential signs of illness and disease, Kashyap says. Toi Labs leases its smart toilet seats to senior-living facilities, charging between $45 and $65 a month per seat, a cost that includes daily reports.

The French company Withings sells pods, at around $500 apiece, that sit inside toilet bowls and use reactions in chemical cartridges to detect vitamin levels, glucose levels and ovulation timing, says product manager Inna Ndaw. Results are sent to an app. The product isn’t yet available in the U.S.

Pods from Withings use reactions in chemical cartridges to detect vitamin levels, glucose levels and ovulation timing.  PHOTO: WITHINGS (RENDERING)

Other inventions are in the works. Toi Labs plans to incorporate electronic-nose, or e-nose, technology to detect smells that could warn of disease. The company is also developing toilet seats that use different types of light against the skin to determine users’ body temperature, heart rate and blood oxygenation.

When it comes to privacy concerns, Toi Labs says that its sensors don’t record body parts and that data collected from its technology is separated from identifiable names.

Makers of smart toilets are building in sterilizing ultraviolet lights and cleaning agents, says Terri Almendares of Farrey’s Lighting, Bath, Kitchen and Hardware in Miami. Ultraviolet light, also used to sterilize hospital rooms, damages bacteria and viruses, preventing them from reproducing. Self-cleaning toilets typically start at around $500 but can cost much more. At about $8,600, Kohler’s Numi 2.0 toilet has sanitizing functions, heated seats and personalized bidet settings. Demand for devices with these capabilities is limited, but Bill Strang, an executive at Toto USA, a maker of self-cleaning toilets in Georgia, reports a surge in U.S. interest in the past five years. 

Kohler’s Numi 2.0 toilet features self-cleaning functions using ultraviolet light. PHOTO: KOHLER (RENDERING)

E-mirror, e-mirror on the wall

Look into your bathroom mirror, and you might one day see a face other than your own—your doctor’s.

Tech companies imagine mirrors with screen-like interfaces that could connect users to healthcare professionals when the devices flag health concerns, says Serval of Baracoda, which owns CareOS, a maker of software for smart mirrors. Smart mirrors with cameras could also help you respond to some of these needs, he says: Built-in artificial intelligence can make personalized skin-care recommendations, and augmented-reality-capable mirrors can guide users on “face yoga” or meditation techniques.

CareOS safeguards security by keeping all data local, Serval says. Instead of uploading the data to the internet, it is stored on devices in the bathroom. Some makers envision smart mirrors as small, secondary mirrors that could be easily covered up to prevent unwanted detection.

NuraLogix’s smart mirror measures blood pressure and predicts heart-attack risk, using a camera equipped to detect facial blood flow. NURALOGIX (2)

NuraLogix, a Canadian health-products company, recently unveiled a tabletop mirror with a camera equipped to detect facial blood flow to reveal your blood pressure and predict risk of heart attack, stroke and hypertension, says Lindsay Brennan, a spokeswoman for the company. Results are displayed on the mirror.

Smart mirrors are rare in U.S. homes, Serval says.

High-tech home spa

Among trends for the future, homeowners will want their bathrooms to be relaxing and safe, supporting health, well-being and longevity, says Alexandra Yacavone, a design studio manager at Kohler, the Wisconsin-based manufacturing company known for its toilets, bathtubs and other fixtures. 

Companies are already experimenting with tech to create a spa feeling at home. Earlier this year, Kohler came out with a bathtub called “Stillness Infinity Experience” that creates soothing waterfall sounds as bathwater overflows into a moat. It comes with a fog machine with aromatherapy capability and built-in custom colored lighting meant to relax the user.

Showers with sauna-like steam and infrared capabilities are already on the market, starting at around $3,000. Research suggests that infrared heat, with its red glow, has benefits including relaxation and stress relief, and it is sometimes promoted as a way to detoxify your body.

High-tech conveniences might also be ahead for bath and shower. Soap and shampoo could sit on scales set to reorder when bottles run low, suggested one paper that looked ahead at the “connected shower.” Voice-activated shower controls are already available, but new methods for fine-tuning the water pressure are in development. A 2022 research paper published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction looked at the prospect of smart showers with cameras that could detect foot gestures to control water pressure to keep the experience hands-free.

A smart floor

After your shower, step onto your smart bath mat. These mats—essentially, advanced scales with pressure sensors inside cushioned, water-absorbent fabric—can measure your weight and body composition. They also detect posture and balance to predict risk of neurodegenerative disease by using thousands of sensors to assess how a user stands and walks, sending the results to an app. BBalance, a maker of smart bath mats that is owned by Baracoda, expects to roll out its mats in the U.S. by 2025, Serval says. 

Using sensors, BBalance’s bath mats detect posture and balance as well as weight and body composition. PHOTO: BARACODA

Smart floor tiles could also use pressure sensors to detect balance, gait and posture. Pressure sensors were embedded underneath ceramic tile floors at a nursing home for a 2020 study conducted at the University of Texas at Arlington. It found that sensors were able to extract meaningful data by measuring the width, length and speed of users’ steps, which could be used to predict fall risk and spot warning signs for illness.

Sinking up

In the future when you wash your hands and brush your teeth, you might get some feedback. 

Tech companies would like to be able to analyze saliva to show the presence of strep or Covid-19 germs going down the drain, Serval says. Though few scientists are currently developing sink technologies, public-health experts already analyze wastewater to track outbreaks of Covid and other diseases. Using a similar technology, sinks could detect the presence of bacteria and viruses, says Alexandria Boehm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who runs an academic program at Stanford University that analyzes municipal wastewater for infectious diseases. But she notes that the presence of toothpaste and other personal-care products could make it harder to get accurate results.

Other researchers are working to develop toothbrushes that could detect Covid or cancer cells in saliva, or predict risk of disease. Beyond saliva tests, future toothbrushes may even use fluorescent lights to detect soft-tissue lesions indicating cancer, says Dr. Guy Adami, an associate professor of oral medicine and diagnostic sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago.