Nintendo Patent
Image: j-platpat

Nintendo's 'Quality of Life' initiative has been in the works for years now - the first time we heard about it was way back in 2014 - but it's been a little while since we last received any new info. Today, however, it has been revealed that the Big N has applied for a new patent that's concerned with measuring health information, including a user’s sleep patterns.

The patent includes a base device which would sit in a user's home and connect to a mobile device. It has plenty of potential tricks up its sleeves, as documented in the description below courtesy of Japanese Nintendo:

The base device is installed in the user’s home where-as the mobile terminal is fully portable. The base device can also charge the mobile terminal when connected with communication between both mobile and base devices also able to be performed by a communication method via a network such as a LAN or the Internet.

A Doppler sensor is included in the base device which detects biological information such as respiration and pulse, in addition to the user’s body movement.

The base device also includes a projector that projects an image on a wall surface (including a ceiling) or a screen. Such images could be to prompt the user to fall asleep or wake up, or to display an image that shows the sleep evaluation result when the user wakes up in the morning.

Further, the base device also includes a camera, speaker, and control unit. The control unit has a CPU and a memory, and can also transmit the information detected by the Doppler sensor to the mobile terminal.

You can read up on all of Japanese Nintendo's findings here if you're interested in learning more.

The last time we heard about Nintendo's Quality of Life plans was in June last year, when the company confirmed that the initiative was still very much alive but wasn't linked to Pokémon Sleep, a mobile app announced by The Pokémon Company.

Have you been keeping tabs on Nintendo's QoL plans? We can't say we're not intrigued about what Nintendo's working on, but for all we know, any eventual product could still be years away from release.

[source j-platpat.inpit.go.jp, via japanesenintendo.com, gonintendo.com]