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Nintendo’s debut foray into what it describes as the Quality of Life sector is a sleep sensor.
Such tech has already been popularised by smartphone users, but CVG reports that Nintendo’s effort will use a bedside device that uses radio frequencies to monitor sleeping patterns before sending the data to the cloud.
It will then offer advice to improve sleep patterns, such as exercise or diet alterations.
Speaking to investors, Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata explained that its QOL tech must meet five criteria – it needs to be non-wearable, non-contact, non-operating (as in it carries out its functions independently), non-waiting and non-installation.
Iwata revealed Nintendo’s Quality of Life plans in January as part of the company’s attempts to establish a new platform business” that is independent from its video games business”.
What Nintendo will try to achieve in the next 10 years is a platform business that improves people’s Quality Of Life in enjoyable ways,” the exec said at the time. While we will continue to devote our energy to dedicated video game platforms, what I see as our first step into a new business area in our endeavour to improve QOL is.
The theme of ‘health’. It has been a long time since people started to say that the console era has now shifted to a new mobile era, with wearable technology in the spotlight at CES this month. Following others into the exceedingly crowded market of mobile applications or the market of wearable technology that is expected to become increasingly competitive and fighting with brute force is not our way of doing business.
Yet again, it is our intention to go into a new blue ocean. With that said, we wish to achieve an integrated hardware-software platform business that, instead of providing mobile or wearable features, will be characterized by a new area of what we like to call non-wearable technology.”
