Sharp Healthcare Support Chair Offers Next-Gen Medical Diagnostics

We're on the ground floor here at CEATEC 2013, where Sharp — which also showed off its Mebius Pad Windows 8.1 — has demonstrated its Health Care Support Chair. With this contraption, which looks at first glance like a high-tech workstation for gaming or computing, clinics can remotely obtain a variety of health information on a patient.

You can see the health care chair in its fully glory in the gallery below, with a couple monitors being equipped for displaying information to the user along the top and a variety of sensors on board. With the chair, the patient takes a seat and can then have a variety of health stats taken for a doctor who is elsewhere.

The Sharp Health Care Chair is capable of reaching the patient's body temperature, as well as the person's heart rate, weight, and blood pressure. All of those are fairly standard readings that can be obtained from smaller isolated devices, but the health care chair can take some other readings beyond them.

Among the additional functionality is the ability to determine one's body balance, as well as how healthy the patient's blood vessels are. The chair could serve a variety of functions, such as expediting the acquisition of a patient's vitals to decrease the amount of time one spends at the clinic or in the doctor's office.