In an interesting Guardian article, Nicola Davis and Rachel David survey a large number of the smart-home technologies currently gestating in the hopes that they may one day quantify you within an inch of your life. The home of the future, even if a few of these tools should come to fruition, is a very helpful and very invasive thing. An excerpt about the bathroom of tomorrow:

Morning ablutions might seem a private affair, but that could all change as technology finds its way into the smallest room in the house.

Among those vying to keep an eye on your vital statistics is Withings, whose “Smart Body Analyzer” makes your old nemesis – the bathroom scales – look positively friendly. Claiming to measure your weight, body fat, heart rate and BMI, it will not only terrorise your tiled floor, but take to your phone: an accompanying app tracks your activity and adjusts your calorie budget for the day to meet your health goals. Think that teatime biscuit looks good? Think again.

Even that most benign of bathroom essentials, the humble loo, is in for an upgrade. Smart toilets have already hit the stores, with American firm DXV anticipating what it somewhat alarmingly terms a “contemporary movement” through its heated seats, night lights and remote controls. But alternatives are already in the offing that can monitor your bodily extrusions better than an over-competitive parent. Japanese company Toto has unveiled its Flowsky toilet that keeps tabs on your rate of gush, while MIT SENSEeable City Lab is working on a loo that can not only recognise the be-throned, but analyse their excrement to shed light on the state of their health and microbiome.

The bathroom might well become the domain of Big Mother. Water-wasters will be chivvied by warning lights thanks to devices like Drop from Qonserve Technologies that displays a red light when the taps have been left running, while bathroom hoggers will be ousted by “water pebbles” that can be programmed to flash red when bathtime’s up. Baths and showers too will be cleaning up their act, with Orbital Systems developing filters to recycle water as it is used and Nebia offering a water-saving shower based on an intense mist of water rather than a traditional deluge. And our towels might even be cleaned without H2O: designer Leobardo Armenta envisages a nifty device that eschews the washing machine for a doughnut-like contraption with a fan to dry the towel and UV light to kill bacteria.•

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In 1967, Walter Cronkite looks at the living room, kitchen and home office of the future.