Your quality of life may lie in the quality of your sleep, according to Nintendo.
Announced today, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata unveiled the first product to come out of the company’s “Quality of Life” initiative: a new device to monitor and track sleep. Developed by U.S. firm ResMed Inc., the device will release by the end of Nintendo’s next financial year, which ends March 2016.
“By using our know-how in gaming… to analyse sleep and fatigue, we can create something fun,” Iwata said. “We only start something new if we think we will be able to create a big market, but as I’m not able to discuss pricing plans and other details today I don’t think there’s much point in giving a figure for our projected scale.”
Iwata explained the technology during a presentation to investors, saying, “Inside the QOL Sensor is a non-contact radio frequency sensor, which measures such things as the movements of your body, breathing and heartbeat, all without physically touching your body.”
This automatically-gathered data will then be transmitted to cloud servers, he added, after which the data will be analyzed and sent to the user as a set of visual graphs.
Iwata’s hope is that this data can help people better understand and improve their quality of sleep. Users will also be advised on a number of methods to improve their sleep, such as exercising or changing diet.
Iwata subsequently declined to comment on the further discussion of pricing, but he did offer suggestions that the device may offer some kind of subscription plan. The CEO only recently returned to work following a several month long recovery from surgery this past June to remove a malignant tumor.