Nearly every major tech company is vying for real estate on your wrist with fitness trackers, smart watches or hybrid devices -- but not Nintendo. Instead, the Japanese gaming company is looking for bedside real estate, announcing earlier today that its developing a contactless sleep tracker that will sit next to your bed and monitor your sleep and fatigue, without any wearing or installing involved.
According to Reuters, Nintendo is working with ResMed, a company that makes devices that track and monitor sleep disorders and illnesses, to create its first non-wearable device. The sleep tracker will be small enough to sit on a bedside table and will use microwave transmission sensors to track sleep. All of the accumulated data will be stored in Nintendo's servers, likely taking advantage of the cloud portion of the company's Quality of Life (QOL) platform, and analyzed to give users advice on how to improve their sleep and overall health.
This isn't Nintendo's first experiment with health -- the beloved Wii Fit took living rooms by storm in 2007 by giving users a fun, accessible way to work out without feeling like they were doing so. Since its launch, the Wii Fit series has sold more than 42 million copies, showing that Nintendo -- if nothing else -- knows how to gamify exercise. The company's chief executive Satoru Iwata plans on using this knowledge with the new sleep device, saying, "By using our know-how in gaming... to analyze sleep and fatigue, we can create something fun." However, the form that Nintendo's sleep tracker will take is still fairly unknown, and the company says the device will not be released until 2016. ResMed already has a consumer contactless sleep tracker of its own, the ResMed S+, so we're curious to see how it will use its expertise in this field to help Nintendo build something unique. We've reached out to ResMed for more details, so stay tuned.
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