Bad Breath? Buy A Mobile Phone With A Halitosis Meter!

Mobile telephones that come with pedometers and pulse meters have been around for long, but A Japanese mobile phone company has finally added a new feature to its handsets that could potentially be really useful; a halitosis meter.

Imagine walking to your next appointment, oblivious of that one glass of beer's let's say radiation. Halitosis is the difficult word for bad breath but you don't need to worry about language when you're in possession of a Mitsubishi mobile telephone which comes with a 'wellness navigator'. The phone was launched recently at the Ceatec 2007 exhibition and its inventors are none other than Japan's NTT DoCoMo.

The phone measures your breath and alerts you when it's time to use that mouth spray, just about the only feature that has not been inbuilt in the device. Aside from the halitosis meter, the DoCoMo invention also has features that keep you informed of your pulse and your paunch, thanks to a built-in pedometer. The device analyzes your body fat too.

The phone is most valuable when a user has customized it completely. You can set your personal excercise goals, send yourself your health data and track whatever you eat by clicking on pictures of typical meals. The handset will tell you when it is about time you got yourself a good night's rest, take some excercise or what you should be eating.

Sound too good to be true? Totally agree. Even the company itself has difficulties sharing its invention, it appears. DoCoMo sort of treats its invention as a secret best kept. They won't tell anyone how to purchase this item. Or how much it will come at. The company's spokeswoman Makiko Furuta was [url=http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19569/ t=_blank]quoted[/url] by Technology Review as saying that "the target market is flabby middle-aged businessmen and diet-conscious young women".

Perhaps the sloppy marketing of this device made in heaven underscores why Japanese phones generally do not make it to the top percentiles of popular phones in the US. Many Japanese phones come with similar features except a halitosis meter and few are in use in the US, which is definitely a health obsessed market.

Reading just how extensive the analysis of bad breath, or exhalation, is in a clinical sense, makes you wonder just how effective the device might be.

Technology Review defines bad breath as 'a complex bouquet of gases, mostly sulfides, which a spouse--or a very good friend--can subjectively evaluate with a sniff'. But it adds that 'Objective assessment is harder'. Apparently, something called a 'gas chromatograph' assesses a chemical composition of breath, or exhalations, but they they're expensive and require trained operators, Technology Review says.

The mobile phone makes use of a so called sulfide monitor. These are generally in use in clinics but a complaint is that they require recalibration very often and sometimes skip to define a particular exhalation as halitosis.

O well, it might provide another false sense of security that could be potentially hilarious or just down right disgusting.