Never again will you have to worry about a roommate hogging the shower in the morning. The Uji showerhead has a light that automatically changes color from green to red, letting you know that you’ve showered enough.
The Uji showerhead was developed as a mechanical engineering project of Brett Andler and his classmates, Sam Woolf and Tyler Wilson of Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. One of their goals is to use green technology to help homes and university dormitories conserve water and energy.
According to the inventors, the desired effect of the Uji showerhead is achieved thanks to a phenomenon called pre-attentive processing. Simply put, the human brain subconsciously associates a particular color to a specific action or condition. In this case, we normally think of the color red as a stop signal or visual stimulus to end the act of showering.
After a wave of experiments with shower-loving college students, the inventors found out that the Uji showerhead did reduce shower time by about 12%.
For now, the prototype has been programmed to transform from green to red in about seven to eight minutes. Hopefully, normal college coeds can get their bathroom routines done in about the same average time. Well, minus the hair prepping, makeup, and picking out the clothes to wear.
The developers hope to tweak this technology and have it available for installation in university dormitories, in which hundreds of gallons of water can eventually be saved. By year 2014, they also aim to make the Uji showerhead available for home use, and is estimated to retail for about $50. Imagine how much you can also save on your energy bill when you reduce the amount of hot water used when showering in your household.
For more innovative shower concepts, check out the Spaces OLED shower or the DIY shower spa.
Via Dornob
