Bathroom Innovations
Our comfort is inexorably linked with convenience. The progress towards our comfortable, modern bathrooms which began in Roman bathhouses was given a huge boost by those early pioneers of the flushing toilet, the inventors who made indoor showers possible, the creators of the home bathtub and the architects of our water supply and sewage systems. With the indoor bathroom long a mainstay of modern homes, it falls to todays designers to create solutions to more contemporary issues.
The challenge of ensuring that the elderly and less able bodied are able to live independently has brought us a range of bathroom innovations from the deceptively simple to the more involved. Think about things such as grab rails and ergonomic tap handles, level access shower trays and walk-in baths. It would be hard for someone with mobility difficulties to consider using, without assistance, a bathroom where there was nothing to catch hold of if they felt unstable, where the tap handles were an awkward size or shape for arthritic fingers, where getting in and out of the bath or shower was simply an impossibility. These design solutions are now readily available from bathroom suppliers on the high street or on the internet, and they make life more liveable for millions every day.
Other solutions to everyday issues have come about through our modern ability to overcome the natural tendencies of materials. The metal out of which taps are made, for example, is naturally inclined to become first warm, then hot, as hot water pours through. Scalding from the taps metal casing is an outcome as inevitable as it is undesirable. Owners of scalded fingers everywhere give thanks, then, to the genius who used insulation techniques to prevent the heat of the water passing into the body of the tap through which it flows.
We use more water in the bathroom each day, too, than in any other room in our homes: this costs us money and it costs the planet. Water saving innovations have come thick and fast in the last decade or two, with the short flush toilet now almost ubiquitous. With a standard flush toilet in place, the flushing toilet which heralded the future for bathrooms in 1872 has been responsible for 30-50% of the water usage of each household. Short flush technology has begun to redress this balance.
Meanwhile, ceramic disc technology in taps has reduced water loss through leakage, and water saving features are becoming more and more common in taps and showers: adding air to the flow of water, for example, ensures that the jets of water still feel luxurious but in fact the amount of water used is dramatically reduced.
Simple measures to improve the harmony of our homes and reduce stresses in our daily lives cannot be underestimated. Hydrotherapy has long been used for the alleviation of stress and muscle tension; now steam showers and whirlpool baths for our home bathrooms are more affordable than ever before.
As our homes fill with products and our tolerance for clutter wanes, bathroom furniture can provide an attractively packaged solution to our storage issues. Its compact nature and huge storage capacity saves us space, making our bathrooms more easily navigable, and reducing the impact of clutter on our daily lives.
And the bathroom has long been the epicentre of our quest for healthfulness through cleanliness. In Japan, inventors have taken this to its natural conclusion in designing a bathroom-based health monitoring tool in the form of the intelligent toilet, on general sale in the country since April 2005. The toilet is equipped with sensors to measure the users blood pressure and urine sugar level, while a pressure pad built into the floor in front of the toilet measures weight. Body fat is then measured by sensors built in to the basin, while the user washes their hands. The data feeds into an application installed on the users home PC, which tracks health changes month by month.
So the modern bathroom allows ease of use across the majority of the population, saves water, provides comfort and convenience, and can even keep an eye on our health. Weve come a long way since the Romans.
The challenge of ensuring that the elderly and less able bodied are able to live independently has brought us a range of bathroom innovations from the deceptively simple to the more involved. Think about things such as grab rails and ergonomic tap handles, level access shower trays and walk-in baths. It would be hard for someone with mobility difficulties to consider using, without assistance, a bathroom where there was nothing to catch hold of if they felt unstable, where the tap handles were an awkward size or shape for arthritic fingers, where getting in and out of the bath or shower was simply an impossibility. These design solutions are now readily available from bathroom suppliers on the high street or on the internet, and they make life more liveable for millions every day.
Other solutions to everyday issues have come about through our modern ability to overcome the natural tendencies of materials. The metal out of which taps are made, for example, is naturally inclined to become first warm, then hot, as hot water pours through. Scalding from the taps metal casing is an outcome as inevitable as it is undesirable. Owners of scalded fingers everywhere give thanks, then, to the genius who used insulation techniques to prevent the heat of the water passing into the body of the tap through which it flows.
We use more water in the bathroom each day, too, than in any other room in our homes: this costs us money and it costs the planet. Water saving innovations have come thick and fast in the last decade or two, with the short flush toilet now almost ubiquitous. With a standard flush toilet in place, the flushing toilet which heralded the future for bathrooms in 1872 has been responsible for 30-50% of the water usage of each household. Short flush technology has begun to redress this balance.
Meanwhile, ceramic disc technology in taps has reduced water loss through leakage, and water saving features are becoming more and more common in taps and showers: adding air to the flow of water, for example, ensures that the jets of water still feel luxurious but in fact the amount of water used is dramatically reduced.
Simple measures to improve the harmony of our homes and reduce stresses in our daily lives cannot be underestimated. Hydrotherapy has long been used for the alleviation of stress and muscle tension; now steam showers and whirlpool baths for our home bathrooms are more affordable than ever before.
As our homes fill with products and our tolerance for clutter wanes, bathroom furniture can provide an attractively packaged solution to our storage issues. Its compact nature and huge storage capacity saves us space, making our bathrooms more easily navigable, and reducing the impact of clutter on our daily lives.
And the bathroom has long been the epicentre of our quest for healthfulness through cleanliness. In Japan, inventors have taken this to its natural conclusion in designing a bathroom-based health monitoring tool in the form of the intelligent toilet, on general sale in the country since April 2005. The toilet is equipped with sensors to measure the users blood pressure and urine sugar level, while a pressure pad built into the floor in front of the toilet measures weight. Body fat is then measured by sensors built in to the basin, while the user washes their hands. The data feeds into an application installed on the users home PC, which tracks health changes month by month.
So the modern bathroom allows ease of use across the majority of the population, saves water, provides comfort and convenience, and can even keep an eye on our health. Weve come a long way since the Romans.