Best High-Tech Toilet?

shellac writes "For a number of years now, Japan has had incredibly high-tech toilets, complete with a funky electronic control panel that controls a water jet for cleaning the posterior, a hot air blow dryer, a fake flushing sound to cover up those noisy "Dumb & Dumber" style sessions, a seat warmer, and other nice features, not to mention the occasional amusing gaijin encounter. Prototype models can also chemically analyze urine using lasers. The manufacturer, Toto, has made these available in the US and in other countries, but they have failed to largely fulfill their promised potential, despite their popularity in Japan. There is some evidence Kohler toilets is keeping these out of American markets. The toilets also appear to be a victim of poor marketing on Toto's part, which in all fairness may be due to Western advertising taboos that do not exist in Japan. I know I would love to have one of these, and I suspect many others would as well. What does that /. community think of these toilets? Can anyone post a personal review?"

Wow.

Just how much time do you spend on the toilet? Time to cut some of the Mountain Dew out of the diet, maybe?

--saint

That's all we need ...

Just what we need, a nation full of toilets blinking 12:00.

The missing tag..

Your post may have been the only time in history where the <BLINK> tag would have made something cooler.

Three Sea Shells

That's nifty and all but I'm still trying to figure out the three sea shells.

Re:Lasers?

I guess this also means, no more masturbating into the toilet.

"Honey, the toilet log says there has been an unusual ammount of semen in the bowl lately..."

Re:Lasers?

Interestingly (to me anyway), the technology that would be required to make this sort of analysis possible and still fit in to the size of a toilet while being cheap enough to sell for common use was just invented two months ago [slashdot.org]. The complex kinds of analysis(more than just glucose measurements) they are hoping to eventually do with these things(cancer detection etc.) is going to require looking at the presence and concentration of complex biomolecules, which presumably they'd use and FTIR setup to do. The new "Quantum-Cascade" lasers are the only ones to offer the small, solid state, tunable, mid-infrared, coherent, broadband lightsource you would need for the spectroscopy instrument.

Post a Personal Review?

Uhh, no thanks..

Clean my posterior?

Do we really want water spraying up at our posteriors from a toilet? Seems like cleanup would be more work, and I wouldn't rely on a towel unless I was able to do some actual CLEANING and not just getter the dingleberries wet. Your other option is toilet paper which never stands up nicely to moisture. I don't want to get my ass wet after a nice healthy movement anyway.

I suppose this is what a bidet is essentially for, but at least you use it with the intention of actually doing to real cleaning of the undercarriage.

Re:Clean my posterior?

Heeeelyeah dude, I've been wanting a sphincterial scrubing water ass-jet thingie for years now. For me it's like cleaning peanut butter from shag carpet. I'll leave you with that wonderful visual ;-)

Monte Carlo Casino Toilet

The most advanced toiled I've ever seen was in Monte Carlo several years ago. It was completely robotic. It had something like a carwash hooked up to it, and commodes on a rotating table. After each flush, it would rotate out the toilet and pressure wash the previous one. They really pamper the high rollers I tell ya!

Re:Monte Carlo Casino Toilet

I've seen similar to these on the street in London and San Francisco. The downside is that if there is a queue, you have to wait for it to complete the "wash cycle" after each user, which includes having the floor descend into a pit of antiseptic goo, and hot sprays washing & drying everything inside.

I had to restrain a lady who tried to bolt straight inside after I had finished. Maybe I shouldn't have...

More efficiency please!

I have a few simple requests to toilet makers:

- Odor detection and removal.

- Gender detection and ajustment (regarding this whole toilet seat issue...)

- Self-cleaning

- Methane detection and recycling

- Portability

- Stability

- Scalability

- Modularity

... Oh man, never work on software design when you need to take a dump...

Re:More efficiency please!

Methane detection and recycling? What do you have a 500lb unemployed girlfriend who eats beans all day that just lost her job that needs to contribute money to the household or something?

California hippie bastards

No shit. Living in california has forced my colon to evolve to point of being able to partition my fecal droppings into portions that will flush. I'm not some fucking vegan soybean eating tweeked out southern california heroin addict, when I take a dump it is a glorious and reveling thing, I'm not some herbivore in the woods walking in the woods with pellets shooting out of my ass I'm the big bear farting big stinky brown torpedos into the water, fuck I'm ranting but why the fuck should I have to keep my frigging plunger near the toilet at all times because you have a better frigging chance to hit the jackpot than to flush the turd, 5 gallon flushes with a woosh sound, a fucking vacuum, I don't care if it sucks so hard my anus is inside out I just my god damn shit to go on happily to wherever it needs to be.

Slashdot is really going down the ...

I guess someone had to say it

I'll buy one if....

I'll buy one if they let me hook it to my LAN, and have a panel with Mozilla built into it. Then I can read /. while I'm in there!

So...

How long until Microsoft tries to corner this market? are we going to have to get used to writing

"shit® happens"?

Re:So...

Well, if MS does enter the market, then I can see how a toilet crash would go. Instead of the BSOD, you'd get the BWOD (Blue Water of Death), in which the blue water in the bowl would rise and rise until it overflows all over the floor.

Needed: affordable self-cleaning public toilets

San Francisco has automated self-cleaning public toilets from JCDeaux. [jcdecauxusa.com] They're bulky and incredibly expensive, costing something like $60,000 per year to maintain. A complete cleaning cycle occurs after each use. Including the floor. There's a phone link for calling 911, a remote maintenance interface, and multilingual recorded voice prompts. Wheelchair accessable. Accepts both quarters and "homeless tokens", which are returned after use. Incredibly overdesigned. San Francisco could only afford 20, and they need at least 100.

I've seen the innards of the things when they're opened up for maintenance. They're built out of components from the Telemechanique industrial automation catalog. There are motors, valves, pumps, tanks, lights, and a computer with a rack of interface cards in a stainless steel box. That works, but it's an expensive way to go. You don't make a mass-produced product that way. You could build a washing machine, say, from industrial automation components, and it would work fine, but cost upwards of $10,000.

Some units from Japan designed for mass-production would help.

Truly high-tech toilet

Whoa... where's the Internetworked toilet seat? [mit.edu]

All I can say...

...is that if I'm expected to spend that much time/effort/money for/on a toilet, there better be a button on that there control panel for "blow^h^h^h^h oral gratification".

Analyze Urine?

At Matsushita's research center in Tokyo, scientists explain how they are working on embedding technology in the porcelain that will catch a urine sample, shoot it full of lasers and in short order test it for glucose, kidney disease and eventually even cancer. One of the researchers, Tatsuro Kawamura, says future smart toilets will compile and compare medical results day by day, allowing doctors to spot important changes.

I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Will it store the information locally or be hooked up to a network? How will it know who's using the toilet? Who's to say they won't test for drugs or something in the future? This could get pretty invasive.

Re:Analyze Urine?

What else can be detected by urine samples? And when will the toilet be on the home or world network? Open up your browser to read From: potty emails.

• Subject: your opiate levels may be over minimum safety for your profession
• Subject: time to have a talk with your daughter about pre-natal care
• Subject: dna census shows at least one non-family member associated with your wife

here in Osaka

where I have been living for the last 8 years,
I would have to say that I would be particularly upset without my electric toilet seat.
No, I am not kidding.

Here is why:
The typical house in Japan is designed for summer and as such as neither 1) central heating nor 2) insulation in the walls. Hence, as you can imagine, that toilet is literally hovering at a temperature just above freezing (0 for most of the world 32 for you in the USA) so sitting on one that is not electrically heated is shocking, to say the least.

Now, on to my review:

First off, aside from its warmth features, the electric toilet seat has two particularly nice options which I would recommend to anyone with a hairy ass.
- One: On most of these toilets there is a nozzle that will spray warm water (although you can control the temperature) where the sun don't shine (and pasty things occasionally get mixed with hairs). The location of the nozzle is controlled via a knob (along with all of the other controls) on the right side of the toilet seat.
Oh, so yes, most (read 99.9999%) of these seats are for the right handed. As far as I know you would have to order a lefty as they are not available in stock here.

--Two: There is a blow dryer that kicks in automatically after that nozzle is done spraying. You can usually control the length of time for the drying bit.

There are of course higher end models that have fragrances, soaps, feminine hygene related options (frontal nozzles and such) which all cost more.

A recent visit to Kojima ( a national electrics chain) resulted in a basic price range of $250 to $900 US (of course I exchanged that from yen ).

There are some problems I could see with selling these in America, not the lest of which is that you would need to get a power outlet installed next to your toilet. This is not something I recall ever having seen in my 22 years in the US so, if you ask me this is the core problem beyond any other related to marketing.

This is rather like the problem that US makers of air conditioners had selling their products in Asia - which is quite funny actually.
Perhaps some of you are aware of this, but I will bring it up just as a final aside and a testament to the inability of companies to make internationally feasible products:
In Japan, at least, air conditioners are bolted to the wall, high, up close to the ceiling. As such no one can operate them without a remote control. As you can imagine the US based makers did not research the use of the product ("of course, they use the same machines the same way we do") so all of the controls were on the AC itself.
It still cracks me up to think about it: forcing people to climb on chairs to adjust the temperature - that might just bite in to your market share a bit don't you think? Duh.

Forgetting to resolve problems of fundamental things like usage in the actual users environment will never get you anything other than a thinner wallet.

If I were a worker at Toto I would re-evaluate the usage of the toilet seat in my target market first.

But, oh well, I am not a marketer.

back to work--

Jeff (by the way, Grummet used to mean, where I grew up, 5 pounds of shit in a 1 pound bag. odd that it applies here some how)

P.S. You may be wondering about those air conditioners, which happen to be off the topic a little, but here is one last anecdote, they are also used as heaters in winter but only do a wonderful job of heating the upper half (up to just below the ceiling ) part of the room so it is usually freezing in the part of the room where everyone spends most of their time: the floor.
Pretty smart, huh?

Urinal-ysis?

So now drug users are going to start peeing in sinks, garbage cans, open drains, dark corners...

Just fucking great. Thanks, scientists! Now we can't even have some fucking privacy when we take a leak>:\

And by "we" I mean EVERYONE, not just drug users. How soon til the toilet detects you've got diabetes and tattles on you to the insurance companies?

Japan is turning into...

...one big adventure game. You know, like Myst or Monkey Island. It's getting to the point that you can't even go to the toilet without figuring out some kind of logic puzzle.

I guess it could be worse, it could be turning into a big platform game. Watch out for those spinning blades!

Toilet Review

Everyone seems to have a pretty negative opinion but these toilets are pretty nice. The have one of the newer Toto models installed in my office in Yokohama.

The first impression you get of the shining white porcelain gadget is the motion sensor activated seat. (Obiviously designed with all those people who are too crippled to lift the seat cover on their own but still miraculously find their way into the bathroom) Swing open the door and you will be greeted by a soothing mechanical whirr as the seat cover goes up. After wiping down the seat with provided disinfectant from the design coordinated dispenser (also a product of toto) You are greeted by a fairly quick change in tempurature from icy cold (Insulation in Japan sucks and central heat does not seem to be of interest in bathrooms here [read: DAMN COLD]) to a pleasant or shall we say encouraging warm tempurature. Not a bad touch. Very good contour to cradle you poor senstive ass after being abused by an office chair everyday. I don't think I need to mention that actual process of 'making a deposit in the bank' as it would seem rather independant of the technology.

And now on to the real fun. I had always assumed that all sorts of water jets and blowers and stuff were for some kind of euro-hippy freak but one terribly hung-over morning at the office I decided to take the challege and 'test' the water jet. I was very impressed by the nice features incorporated into the jet alone. The water tempurature angle and water pressure are all independantly adjustable to suit all body sizes and 'consistancies' (for lack of a better word). I felt rather clean, refreshed and not unpleasant at all, after all it saved me the trouble of wiping!

Being a curious, I have experimented with the jet mechanism at a later date and discovered that at maximum pressure activting the jet while not being seated results in an entertaining water jet that easily crosses to the far side of the stall with little loss of angle or tradjectory. Then by adjusting the angle mechanism I realized that the jet could easily reach tie or even face levels of the average male and realized the potential for an excellent prank hack. (It would really be a shame if someone rigged a trigger to the stall door, wouldn't it...).

Following the encounter with the water jet anyone would realize the need for a drying mechanism as toilet paper does not respond well to moisture. As with the water jet the dryer/blower also has adjustments for angle tempurate and air pressure making for a quick and pleasant drying experience. After multiple test runs timing revealed that the dryer could generally complete its task in 25-35sec with no discomfort. (When placed under time constraints the dryer could produce sufficient lack of moisture in a record time of roughly 12.6 seconds but would not be classified as in the 'comfort zone'.)

Due to being of the male variety and forseeable sloppiness, I could not test but give due note to a full set of water jets and dryers located in the front of the toilet to satisfy the needs of our geek friends who do not a twig and berries nor wedding tackle. The frontal jets were also adjustable for tempurature, angle and pressure leading me to the assumption that they would provide appropriate customization to satify most body shapes and preferences. (Unfortunately no ladies were willing to comment on the functionality of the frontal jets)

From an overall view-point I was very pleased with the performance of this toto model (sorry no model number available at this time) however in the office environment one problem was noticable. Often a venture to the 'techo-head', as I affectionately refer to it, revealed that the settings were often adjusted to preferences other than my own and would require some fine tuning before use to provide the optimal bathroom experience. I realized that it lacked the ability to create presets for individual 'users'. This model lacks the ability to present controls and the small number of analog controls would allow one to assume that presets would not be feasible with out a major redesign of the interface and circuitry. In the event that presets did become a option it would be very convenient to register these settings in a directory server. All in all I would give it 4 out of 5 Johns because of the lack of a presets and still some room in the concept to mature but all together a very pleasant dump.

As I cannot afford to be slashdotted, pictures of the jet mechanisms and control panels as well as model numbers and information will be available by email. Send mail to SCE(at)SUBDIMENSION(dot)COM with 'techno-head' in the subject line and I will send you the photos etc.

Americans don't need high-tech toilets

I think these Japanese toilets are a bit overkill for Americans, especially when you consider most American homes don't suffer the issue of really cold toilet seats.

What I do want is toilets that flush completely in only 1.6 gallons of water per flush. This was a major problem with the early water-saving toilets, since often you had to flush twice to flush the toilet bowl cleanly. I believe it was Kohler that first corrected this problem with very careful design of the way water circulates in the toiler bowl during the flush cycle. I know that some toilet makers resorted in using pressurized water tanks (I kid you not!), but I'm not sure if the potential for mechanical trouble is worth it.

Well...

I prefer to drop all my deuces right here in the comments section of slashdot.

I haven't used anything else as a toilet in years.

- A.P.

Hi-tech

Nothing beats THIS [molina.com.br]

Just when you thought Slashdot hit bottom...

Incase you missed it, here's the whole Ask Slashdot article summed up in two lines:

"Dear Slashdot....I enjoy jets of water shot at my anus, and i'm willing to pay the big bucks for it!! Any suggestions?"

Think about the sum total of what you've just read, then maybe it will hit you. Slashdot certainly isnt what it used to be, is it....And you thought Yahoo Internet Life was bad? Welcome to the new Slashdot, folks -- What once was the proud sentinel of geekdom has been reduced to running stories on toilets. Sure smacks of "stuff that matters" to me, I tell ya. Anyway, before you go off and moderate me down for being off-topic or trollsome, ask yourself this: How many other articles were rejected (re: meaningful, important articles, peoples work, interesting points of view, etc.) so that this story could make it in? On Easter, of all days. Simply charming.

Surprisingly, i'm not trying to troll here. I'm trying to make a point. Just a day or two ago, I had written to Ask Slashdot regarding the issue of Linux on the desktop, and whether it was truly fair to call it "dead", when infact viable, stable, professional-quality desktops are available for Linux. HP certainly doesnt think the Linux desktop is dead -- They bundle GNOME with HP-UX. IBM isn't crazy either; They bundle both KDE -and- GNOME in AIX... So whats all the hub-bub about Linux being dead on the desktop? But, nope, we cant discuss that.....Not here on Slashdot. There are more important things to address in a public forum such as this..

Like how to have jets of water shoot at our anuses.

Cheers,