Google Wants To Be in Your Bathroom

The title of this story might sound you creepy as this could be another attempt to breach your privacy not even leaving your bathroom, however this attempt of Google to reach your bathroom might actually save your life.

A patent from Google highlights its ambition to put sensors in your bathroom that might reveal cardiovascular health issues, improve heart health, and alert medical professionals. The patent details how Google could use “optical sensors” placed in patients’ devices or belongings to capture data on individual’s cardiovascular function – all with the aim of motivating behavioral changes and reducing instances of heart disease.

The sensors might even be positioned (the patent’s illustrations below) in a “sensing milieu" in a patient’s bathroom.



The patent describes sensors in a bath mat, for example, being able to measure heart rate through the body’s electrical patterns.

The patent also shows a camera in the bathroom mirror, which would be able to detect things like skin color variations. The patents also show toilet seats and bath mats with embedded sensors which can measure heart rate and body electrical patterns. It also describes a non-invasive camera in the bathroom mirror that can detect skin colour variation. All this will lead to a "Smart bathroom" which would be able to provide health updates which can be analyzed by health professionals.

The company even wants to put sensors in the toilet, which would be able to sense blood pressure, and sensors in the bathtub, creating an “ultrasonic” bathtub that could perform an echo test. All of this data could be collected and eventually sent to health professionals, if that’s what the user wants.



Google’s new possible invention for at-home health tracking would:

• Monitor certain aspects of a patient’s physical appearance; and


• Track changes in appearance that relate to cardiovascular health problems.

In addition, it would integrate with other Google hardware and software -- such as Android phones and Google Glass -- to capture, process, and analyze as much user cardio-data as possible.

The data would be monitored for trends and shared with patients or their medical professionals.

It is to be noted however that just because there’s a patent doesn’t mean there will be a product. Patent activity of tech companies are actually kind of sneak peak of tech giants' investment strategies particularly in R&D. Notably, Amazon has patented heart-rate detection by smartphone and Apple has patented smartphone-based health tracking. Now Google is moving deeper into medical data as well. Google is also working on other health-related projects, such as Google Lens, which could help users monitor their blood sugar levels.

In 2015, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, had invested in a startups called Nebia that makes shower heads which can reduce the amount of water used by up to 70%.

In 2016, Google had filed a patent for the Tearable screen technology, which facilitates tearing of a display screen, cut off and used independently.

Years back, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a private foundation founded by Bill Gates and his wife in year 2000 has funded a project four-years back which is called – “Nano Membrane Toilet” or Water-less Toilet which will be able to treat human waste on-site without external energy or water.

Google Wants To Be in Your Bathroom

The title of this story might sound you creepy as this could be another attempt to breach your privacy not even leaving your bathroom, however this attempt of Google to reach your bathroom might actually save your life.

A patent from Google highlights its ambition to put sensors in your bathroom that might reveal cardiovascular health issues, improve heart health, and alert medical professionals. The patent details how Google could use “optical sensors” placed in patients’ devices or belongings to capture data on individual’s cardiovascular function – all with the aim of motivating behavioral changes and reducing instances of heart disease.

The sensors might even be positioned (the patent’s illustrations below) in a “sensing milieu" in a patient’s bathroom.



The patent describes sensors in a bath mat, for example, being able to measure heart rate through the body’s electrical patterns.

The patent also shows a camera in the bathroom mirror, which would be able to detect things like skin color variations. The patents also show toilet seats and bath mats with embedded sensors which can measure heart rate and body electrical patterns. It also describes a non-invasive camera in the bathroom mirror that can detect skin colour variation. All this will lead to a "Smart bathroom" which would be able to provide health updates which can be analyzed by health professionals.

The company even wants to put sensors in the toilet, which would be able to sense blood pressure, and sensors in the bathtub, creating an “ultrasonic” bathtub that could perform an echo test. All of this data could be collected and eventually sent to health professionals, if that’s what the user wants.



Google’s new possible invention for at-home health tracking would:

• Monitor certain aspects of a patient’s physical appearance; and


• Track changes in appearance that relate to cardiovascular health problems.

In addition, it would integrate with other Google hardware and software -- such as Android phones and Google Glass -- to capture, process, and analyze as much user cardio-data as possible.

The data would be monitored for trends and shared with patients or their medical professionals.

It is to be noted however that just because there’s a patent doesn’t mean there will be a product. Patent activity of tech companies are actually kind of sneak peak of tech giants' investment strategies particularly in R&D. Notably, Amazon has patented heart-rate detection by smartphone and Apple has patented smartphone-based health tracking. Now Google is moving deeper into medical data as well. Google is also working on other health-related projects, such as Google Lens, which could help users monitor their blood sugar levels.

In 2015, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, and Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, had invested in a startups called Nebia that makes shower heads which can reduce the amount of water used by up to 70%.

In 2016, Google had filed a patent for the Tearable screen technology, which facilitates tearing of a display screen, cut off and used independently.

Years back, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a private foundation founded by Bill Gates and his wife in year 2000 has funded a project four-years back which is called – “Nano Membrane Toilet” or Water-less Toilet which will be able to treat human waste on-site without external energy or water.

This Google Patent Could Make ‘Real-Life Experiences’ Searchable

Think about those moments when you lost your car keys or an important doccument and you thought that life would have been much easier if, just like computers, there could be a Cntrl + F (search) feature in your real life.

Google, the search engine giant, has once again found solution to something similar problem of yours. The company has found a way of making people's real-life experiences searchable online.

With the company's new patent, one could make his/her real-life experiences searchable via a device like the Google Glass. The patent link can be availed here.

Reportedly, videos recorded using devices such as a wearable (think Google Glass) could be made searchable at a later date, using the new patent. The process goes something like this. When a video is recorded, the video is sent to the paired phone, and then further to a server to be stored there in order to make a collection of the users ‘real-life videos’. The video can then be searched later by using the online databases. A user will just have to give a query like " My videos from my India Trip", to the wearable device and it will display the relevant results to its user.

Spreading more light on how the query search will work, the patent reads, "the method may also include transmitting a query of the user to the server computer system to initiate a search of the history or real-world experiences, and receiving results relevant to the query that include data indicative of the media data in the history of real-world experiences.”

The patent further notes, “When the user is determined to be within a popular location, preference manager may automatically turn on media capture without intervention of a user. In another embodiment, preferences manager, may be set to continuously or periodically capture media data for a specific interval of time.”

The patent even suggests that the technology could be used by security forces, who could ask questions like “Show me the faces of all people that were seen between 1 P.M. and 3 P.M.” to see everyone seen by a group of security guards wearing Glass. It could essentially turn everyone wearing Glass into a walking CCTV camera.

While being able to search your own real-life experiences might just be the next step towards the future, this particular thing will take some time to go live as the idea is just a patent right now.

With the current generation making full use of its high definition video smartphone cameras, a searchable index for videos was a much needed invention. But, considering these real-life experiences will be searchable, privacy may prove to be a concern for many users.