It was only a matter of time before the bathroom got the full smart home treatment.
While there have been IoT devices designed to work while you’re on the toilet or bathing, the lack of plugs in bathrooms is a major pain point (albeit one that stops you getting electrocuted…)
At CEATEC in Japan, Mitsubishi Electric introduced its wireless, modular, wall-mounted IoT concept that takes your bathroom to the next level and get round some of the existing issues with bringing smart capabilities to your restroom.
It doesn’t have a catchy name (yet), but works via a control panel fitted into a bathroom wall. This panel responds to voice commands and shows the time and room temperature among other snippets of information that you can personalise.
On top of this panel are modular sensors including an air sensor and a projector (and even a shelf for a bonzai tree) that charge wirelessly and connect using NFC.
You could lay in the bath and ask for the room temperature to be increased, play Netflix on the wall in front of you and even fill the room with fragranced mist to take your relaxation to the next level. The conceptual modules could be personalised to suit your bathroom needs and, in theory at least, be used to control other smart home devices such as lights or music.
Japan is already the home of incredible toilet controls built into panels on the walls and industrial looking basins with built-in sprays, bidets and even privacy settings that let you play sounds to mask any…noises. This IoT panel is an extension of this.
Sadly it’s just a concept at the moment and there are no immediate plans to launch it in Japan or internationally.
At CEATEC, Mitsubishi Electric demonstrated a wireless charging plate that could be fitted into the floor of a garage or car park that charges an electric car when its parked above it
Elsewhere at CEATEC, Mitsubishi Electric demonstrated its voice separation technology, which solves the “cocktail party” problem of speech recognition software. Humans are naturally able to distinguish different voices and block out those which aren’t needed at parties, for example, but it’s much harder for AI to do the same.
By training its speech recognition on 100 English voices, Mitsubishi Electric was able to teach the AI to pick out changes in tone and pitch in multiple voices. During a demo, two people spoke in different languages at the same time into a microphone. The original audio was then separated and each voice was played back separately and accurately.
This worked with male and female speakers, as well as two male speakers. Notably, because the AI recognises tonal differences, it doesn’t need to understand different languages.
The company also demonstrated a wireless charging plate that could be fitted into the floor of a garage or car park that charges an electric car when its parked above it.
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