CES 2024: Smart Tech Aims to Be Number One in Your Bathroom

From speaking toilet seats to AI-enabled air vents, CES had a lot to offer in the bathroom.

Every smart-tech brand makes robot vacuums and security cams, but until recently, the bathroom has been mysteriously absent from the smart home ecosystem. Brands have dabbled, sure, but it was a lot of touch faucets and not a lot of legit smart functionality. CES 2024 is shifting that narrative, with lots of innovations that might make you more excited to visit the bathroom.

Smart tech in the bathroom

Bidets have never had the hold on American toilets the way they do everywhere else, but the bidet market had a moment during the toilet paper shortage of 2020. With Americans beginning to embrace the luxury of a preheated seat in winter, the market has opened up.

At CES 2024, Bemis debuted the Bemis BB-1200 ($399) toilet seat, which includes features like a warm water bidet, an air dryer, a night light, and a wireless remote in the form of your smartphone. Bemis finally gets that you are likely on your phone anyways, so you might as well use it to have a completely customized experience with your bidet via their app. 

Of course, if you’ve got the money to spare, you can skip the bidet and embrace an entirely smart toilet. At $8,625, Kohler's new Numi 2.0 layers on a suite of spa-like cleansing and drying functions, UV cleaning, and seat heating. It also features ambient lighting and speaker for a truly throne-like experience. Kohler has a few other models that are more reasonably priced: The Innate Smart Toilet ($2,550), the Eir Smart Toilet ($5,325), and the PureWash E930 bidet seat, which is reasonable, relatively speaking, at $1,290.

Tech to analyze what’s in the bowl

Last year, two companies introduced analysis tech to the toilet. Withings U-Scan is a device that lives in the toilet bowl, monitoring nutrition and vitamin levels, metabolic status, and even ovulation cycles by "detecting a large variety of biomarkers found in urine." Vivoo’s sensor lives in the toilet seat hollow, and, using a deep bench of experience in urine testing, reports back health issues and nutritional advice. This happens all within 90 seconds, and the results are delivered right to your smartphone.

Both companies returned to CES this year: Withings brought a handheld body scanner named Beamo to replace the digital thermometer in your bathroom; and Vivoo debuted an at-home UTI test. 

Bringing the spa experience home

This year at CES, Kohler went in hard on the shower, using smart tech to help turn the domestic bathroom into a spa. The new Anthem+ Digital Control, an update on the existing Anthem ($441) is basically a display hub for your bathroom, controlling water temperature, pressure, and other settings from a slick wall-mounted screen. The Anthem+ can connect to various types of showerheads, as well as the other connected devices in your bathroom, like those that control lights and music.

This type of tech extends to the Stillness Bath, Kohler’s line of smart tubs that fill, heat, and drain on their own. You can create immersive experiences with light, smell, and fog to help you relax—which you likely need if you just spent $17,000 on a bathtub. 

It's important to note that the linchpin of the truly smart bathroom seems to be the smart valves that need to be placed inline, within the waterline itself. That’s some serious retrofitting for most people (unless your builder left you easy access to the line), but once you’ve got smart valves in place, controlling them via an app or physical interface is straightforward.

Managing the utilities

Kohler wrapped up their bathroom suite with the Atmo, a connected bathroom fan, which analyzes temperature and humidity to activate itself—though you can also schedule the fan and lights, set custom color temperatures, and generally customize the way it works to your needs. 

If this all seems like a good way to use a lot of water, it is. As a result, tracking that water usage, in addition to monitoring for leaks, is also burgeoning market. Moen reintroduced the Flo (starts at $500), an inline water monitor at CES. Flo uses AI to learn your patterns and claims to detect even miniscule leaks and can turn off the water to prevent damage. A fact I found fascinating: The company says 60% of Flo users detect a leak they didn’t know about before in the first 30 days of use. 

The sharing economy finds the last frontier- bathrooms

It’s not just the home loo, either. An app named Flush will monetize commercial bathrooms in restaurants, hotels, and cafes, creating a pay-to-use system. One the one hand, the idea of having access to a network of toilets that are usually barred behind "paying customers only" signage is appealing—but it seems like a big problem for people experiencing houselessness that rely on this network of non-monetized bathrooms. Flush promises to keep costs under $10 a visit for now, and uses a bidirectional rating system for guests and bathrooms to keep everyone honest. 

The most connected room in your home

The bottom line (pause for laughter) is that all your major home systems—electrical, water and ventilation—meet in the bathroom. It’s a health hub, a sanctuary, and it’s time for smart technology to bring us all a little relief.