Halitosis-detecting phone

From the school of products that remind you of your inadequacies (and hopefully prompt you to buy stuff) comes this phone that measures the smelliness of your breath.

All you do is hold the handset up to your mouth, blow briefly on a sensor at one end, and in ten seconds it rates your halitosis on a scale of one to ten – based on the sulphur content in your breath.

After a morning coffee, I scored a six, which was accompanied by the message “You're still fine to talk to people, but you should be a little bit worried.”

The phone, which is still a prototype and is not expected to come out until 2009 at the earliest, also measures heart rate, body fat, and can be used as a pedometer. (You put it in your pocket and it senses your leg movement, so the theory goes.)

DoCoMo, the Japanese operator which is developing it, said that sensors which allow phones to interact with their environment would drive the next wave of handsets – a message that is also expounded by Nokia. (The Finnish handset maker is developing phones which react to ambient light.)

In Japan, these technologies had taken a “health turn” because of fears about rising obesity, DoCoMo said.

“Nowadays there's a lot of people in Japan who are overweight – mostly because the country's diet has changed – and as a result you're seeing the society become more health-conscious. That in turn is influencing the development of new products like this,” Eiji Yano, an assistant manager in DoCoMo's product division, said.

The company was also demonstrating handsets that can be used as steering wheels in games by sensing the way a user is holding them – a bit like the technology that powers Nintendo's Wii, but on a mobile phone.

Comments

[Msmith]

i wonder if this device has a fart detector on it

[MobCasts]

This is the first step towards a StarTrek like triquarter device.. Can't wait.

[kari]

i think its quite good coz my breath stinks like a fish factory

[Chas]

Finally, a machine that can tell you something that perhaps nobody else will. Now we just need a device to tell us when we have something between our teeth.