Quality of Life (QOL) revealed

This is probably the only forum that this discussion belongs in at Gamespot. It's nothing to do with gaming (as far as they've announced for now anyway), and this is the "Nintendo Discussion" board after all.

So what do you think? Do you think it will be anything to do with video games? Or a random side-venture?

Personally, I've thought about this problem. It's definitely an interesting area and the technology sounds really cool. I'd definitely be keen to try it.

One of the biggest concerns I have is that this product will appeal to a lot of people who are in a relationship - so that means that two people will be sleeping in one room. Will this technology be able to figure out the sleeping patterns irrespective of how many people are sleeping in the room? And can it figure out who is who? Because if it can't, I don't think it will be very successful.

See the full description here: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/141030/05.html

The summary from GoNintendo:

Everyone needs to sleep, and all of us get tired. There is no argument that whether or not we have sound sleep or not significantly affects our health, and many of us recognize through our daily lives that accumulated fatigue makes it difficult to maintain good health. However, we tend to recognize these conditions in a subjective fashion. Fatigue and sleep are themes that are rather hard to visualize in more objective ways. At Nintendo, we believe that if we could visualize them, there would be great potential for many people regardless of age, gender, language or culture.

Of course, there are currently several existing ways to measure our sleep status. However, even though there must potentially be significant demand to visualize sleep, there have not been any definitive products to date. We believe that this must be because devices launched so far have required consumers to make some kind of effort, which made it rather difficult to continue.

I decided that Nintendo should step into this QOL business because:

The company has now reached the point where we will be able to realize the Five “Non” Sensing elements. Five “Non” Sensing is the concept that in spite of eliminating the five things that have been necessary so far, we still can measure the status of sleep and fatigue automatically.

Among these Five “Non” Sensing elements, I mentioned the first keyword, “non-wearable,” which means that you do not need to attach anything to your body, during our last Corporate Management Policy Briefing. I believe, and I think many of you will agree, that we want to wear only things that are very comfortable when we go to bed. If we need to wear a device, say, on our wrist, or if we need to install some special equipment in our bed, we will sometimes forget, which therefore makes it hard to continue. Thus, I believe the “non-wearable” concept is very important. The next one is “non-contact,” which means that the product will not have any physical contact with your body. While attaching a sensor to your body is convenient for giving you a read out of your biological information, few people appear to enjoy having unusual objects attached to their bodies while sleeping. Therefore, the ability to measure without physical contact is another important point. The next one is “non-operating.” Not requiring the user to operate the device is another key point, as it can encourage continuity. Not everyone has a clear head when they get into or out of bed. Whether we have to operate a device or not when we get into and out of bed significantly changes our ability to continue. Another factor is “non-waiting,” or in other words, eliminating the wait for measurement results to be produced. From sensing to analysis, measuring biological information inevitably takes some time. This is one of the issues we could not overcome with our “Wii Vitality Sensor” project. However, if we can make it so that the measurement can be done automatically while the user is sleeping, and if it can be done without any operation, the user does not need to wait. Finally, “non-installation efforts,” or not requiring users to go through the trouble of installing the product to start is another important key factor.

Visualizing sleep and fatigue by automatically measuring sleep condition under this concept of Five “Non” Sensing is going to be the first step for Nintendo’s QOL business.

We will prepare the QOL Sensor that will automatically measure sleep condition under this Five “Non” Sensing concept. All you have to do is place the QOL Sensor on your bedside.

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 be transmitted to the QOL cloud servers, which will then analyze the data measured by the sensor and visually represent sleep and fatigue results.

To achieve the visualization of sleep and fatigue, we have formed a business alliance with ResMed, which is headquartered in the U.S. and is the leading corporation in the world that develops, manufactures and markets medical equipment for the treatment, diagnosis and management of Sleep Disordered Breathing, COPD and other chronic diseases. The company operates business in dozens of different countries around the world while its main business is conducted in the U.S. I understand that they have many users in Japan too.

They have now provided Nintendo’s QOL business with the core of the Five “Non” Sensing elements, namely, non-contact sensor measurement technology and sleep condition estimation technology.

ResMed has been contributing to improving patients’ QOL in the medical equipment field by improving their sleep condition, and for Nintendo, a company that develops, manufactures and markets products for the general public, we think this partnership is a good fit as both companies can bring out each other’s strengths.

Since fatigue per se is not regarded as a disease in the medical world, it is said to be a field where sufficient research has yet to be conducted. We have been fortunate to encounter several experts who have been conducting cutting-edge research in the science of fatigue. Together, we are now developing technology to estimate fatigue.

Dr. Yasuyoshi Watanabe is an expert in a wide variety of health-related fields, and his name is recognized in fatigue science around the world. Dr. Watanabe kindly provided us with his comment: “Accurate and simplified fatigue measurements enable self-comprehension of the body which is very significant for contemporary humans, and I think it can be used as the benchmark to improve our QOL. We will all do our utmost to achieve this world-first product.”

The state-of-the-art research results in fatigue science that Dr. Hirohiko Kuratsune and Dr. Seiki Tajima have been jointly conducting will also be used in fatigue visualization for Nintendo’s QOL platform.

If we can realize the visualization of sleep and fatigue with Five “Non” Sensing elements, the QOL improvement cycle will go as follows:

First, with Five “Non” Sensing aspects, your sleep and fatigue can be automatically measured. All you will have to do is place the QOL sensor near your bed and then sleep as usual. The collected data will be transmitted to the QOL cloud servers and will be analyzed and evaluated. Based upon the sleep and fatigue status of the consumer which have both been “visualized,” services intended to improve QOL will be proposed. More specifically, a variety of actions will be recommended. Consumers will be encouraged to take certain actions, such as exercising or changing diet. Then, the results will be measured through Five “Non” Sensing elements each day. By continuing the measurements every day, users will be able to observe a gradual change achieved by their actions. This cycle can contribute to the improvement of QOL, and the QOL improvement platform can help realize it.

To summarize, With Five “Non” Sensing aspects, we will make it easy for anyone to use it.

With Nintendo’s know-how of hospitality as well as of making people want to continue, we will encourage people to enjoy using it every day. As a result, a meaningful cycle will be established aiming to improve people’s QOL. These are the basic elements of our QOL improvement platform.

Edit:
Actually, I just found this image. Looks like it does play a role in video games:

What the... ummmmm...what?? Nintendo focus on making great games again. We need a new F-zero, Starfox, 1080 Snowboarding ETC. Please go back to what you've been doing the longest.

Looks like a side-project not related to gaming.

They're diversifying, creating a secondary business model that can help sustain the company when the video game side can't pull all the weight. The people working on this project wouldn't be making video games if they weren't working on this.

I saw the Microsoft version yesterday and was going to right a post saying it was obvious what they where going to do now, but it looks like N released the news at the same time. I just dont know how accurate these devices will be, I have been into health and BB since the 7th grade and I dont see these devices having any real meaning. Your body will give you feedback when you exercise and eat healthy and when your doing it you know it.

I guess for people who are unhealthy and have struggled to get healthy for a long time it will appeal to them and fitness is becoming really trendy as of lately.

Looks like they are focusing on sleep but will expand to metabolic rate, BPM, calories used most likely like Apple and Microsoft. Sleep has gotten a lot more attention lately with talk of sleep apnea and cpap machines.

From that description it's for people who don't like to put work into being healthy, it'll just be junk. But on the financial side, Wii fit sold in droves so this may make them something.

What?

so its another fitness peripheral...like the balance board.

this will be the sleep monitor. my mom has trouble sleeping maybe this will help? id buy :P

It seems a bit redundant to me because there are already many free (and paid) apps that offer this service. You just put your phone on the bed while you sleep and it measures your movements etc. Sure, it may not be as sophisticated but neither do you have to buy something dedicated and put it on your wall.

Don't see how this will be successful ..unless its super accurate. Pointless if all its gonna do is tell you, you have a problem now go see your doctor. :P

Pretty much how I feel too.

Even if it were super accurate, I still have absolutely no interest in having Nintendo watch me while I sleep, or shit, or eat, or monitor any of my biological functions sensor-free to help improve my lifestyle. If I have trouble sleeping or doing any of those things to the point that it becomes a detriment to my daily life, I'll go see my doctor. I will never pay one dime for a device to sit at my bedside table during the night to be able to tell me what blurry vision and fatigue throughout the day already do, and if I ever did, it certainly wouldn't be from Nintendo.

Which brings up a good question for many......why would people choose Nintendo for such a service? What experience do they have? They are going to be diving into a blood red ocean and going up against monsters like Apple, Google, and MS, behemoths that aren't lacking in expertise and aren't going to be waiting until 2016 to get on the ball (which is when QoL plans to launch). I myself hold no confidence Nintendo can succeed in an industry when they can't even do so in one where they have the world at their disposal, yet I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt here? Nope. Nintendo's one of the last companies I'd trust. I don't think the power of their IPs will be enough, nor do they understand how to market. Their strength lies in games. If they were dominating with the U right now perhaps I'd feel differently, but they can barely sustain themselves as is.

I sincerely hope this isn't what they are betting on to help recover from their current predicament. From what's been shown so far, QoL will be a luxury item in peoples' lives, very niche at best, I highly doubt it will catch on seriously anywhere outside of Japan, and if it does it will be in heavy competition with the biggest hitters in the market who are at this moment putting their full force behind getting their own QoL services up and running. Am I the only one that finds all this a bit crazy? Frankly, this entire QoL venture strikes me as ludicrous. Nintendo's like a blind drunk in a dark room filled with glory holes, rapidly and desperately thrusting its dick at every opening in the wall hoping to eventually hit pay dirt. That's at least what this feels like.

I'll tell you what WILL help me sleep better, Ninty: make a Metroid or Zelda that keeps me up 72 hours straight because it's so amazing. I promise you then I'll sleep like a baby.....no QoL needed.

And how is it a good idea to branch out to a non-gaming market when you're not exactly doing swell in the market that you've actually specialize in for the past 30 or so years? Seem like a terrible idea to me. Or maybe I'm wrong and this will actually be successful. Hoping I'm wrong though I highly doubt people will choose Nintendo (A renown gaming company) over any of the other companies making similar products...

A struggling computer company created the iPhone.

A struggling video game company created the Dreamcast.

You just never know with this stuff. Iwata seems to think that Nintendo's vision for their product fills a gap in the market, and we know that Nintendo will make the whole thing fun if nothing else. And if the market is saturated with exactly this kind of thing by next year, then I wouldn't be surprised to see Nintendo kill it off before it even launches.

But I don't know much about the market. Maybe there are already a ton of non-wearable, automatic health systems out there.

Personally I've tried to monitor my sleeping habits on a few occasions. It's a huge part of our lives (1/3 of our lives), and there's hardly any data analysis on that period. I've tried various methods which I've ultimately given up on due to not being able to bother keeping track of it (it's at an inconvenient time to set up - when you're most tired), nor is the data captured very detailed. Nintendo seems to acknowledge this problem in their statement.

In terms of trusting Nintendo for their service - you're right. But, the thing is, they're not developing the core technology that captures and analyses the data. The company ResMed Inc. are doing this, and they're on the cutting edge for this kind of data capture and analysis. Nintendo are simply backing it and collaborating with them to bring it into the mainstream in various ways (unspecified at the moment).

Exactly! What did Apple, a computer company, know about health devices and apps? What did Google know, they're a search engine? If anything, Nintendo is in a better position due to having manufactured many consumer devices which utilize human input and interpreted images and movement into data.

Now, I'm not saying I'd jump on this sleep monitoring device, but it's not because Nintendo is doing it.

I'm a bit of a health nut so I might be into buying some of this when it gets released.