Nintendo Just Wants to Watch You Sleep

Updated on Nov 1, 2014 at 9:05 AM

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By Lauren Orsini

Game company Nintendo has developed a fatigue and sleep deprivation sensor that functions without ever touching your body.

Instead, Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata says that the sensor can be placed on a nightstand to monitor you while you sleep. Its hands-free approach to health tracking has the company calling the device the first of its kind.

Source: Nintendo via GameSpot

These are the first details we've heard about Nintendo's "quality of life" suite of products, due to be released in 2016.

"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," Iwata said, speaking to investors at the company's second-quarter earnings results briefing Thursday.

The device is able to function without physical touch because it uses radio waves to monitor a user's heart rate, movement, respiration, and fatigue. Once it collects the data, it transfers it to Nintendo's servers for analysis.

And since this is the company that brought us Mario and Luigi, Iwata said Nintendo's ultimate goal is to find a way to gamify sleep tracking for users.

"We expect the QOL-improving platform to provide us with new themes which we can then turn into games that operate on our future video game platforms too," Iwata said. "Once we have established such a cycle, we will see continuous positive interactions between the two platforms that enable us to make unique propositions."