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?"

Comments

Clean my posterior?

[hendridm]

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.

Needed: affordable self-cleaning public toilets

[Animats]

San Francisco has automated self-cleaning public toilets from JCDeaux. 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.

Re:Lasers?

[deglr6328]

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. 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.