Way back in 2015 it was suggested that Nintendo's Quality of Life initiative had been put on the back burner following the untimely passing of company president Satoru Iwata. Given that not much has been said about QOL, you'd be forgiven for assuming that Nintendo had quietly axed the project in favour of making its money with the Switch, smartphone games, merchandising and theme parks.

However, in the recently published official english translation of Nintendo's Annual Report for 2017, this statement on QOL was tucked away on page 12:

Moreover, we are working on the development of a new product that improves people’s QOL (Quality of Life) in enjoyable ways. Our aim is to enable consumers to make daily efforts to improve their QOL in a fun manner by making sleep and fatigue status visible and offering various services based on this information. Nintendo continues to engage in the development of new products for the future.

It's intriguing that Nintendo still hasn't given up on the idea of developing its own QOL sleep tracker. Last year we took a look at Hello Sense, which was one of the big players in the market at the time; in the span of only one year the tracker maker Hello is shutting down.

However that's not to say that the idea of sleep tracking is dead in the water, far from it. Apple recently acquired a company called Beddit which produces a sleep monitor that slides under a bedsheet to monitor sleep quality. Nokia recently acquired health electronics company Withings, which produced the Aura Sleep Monitor, so it probably does give us a hint why Nintendo might not have dismissed the QOL idea entirely.

Let us know what you think about Nintendo's determination to see these products through to completion, at some unspecified date, with a comment below.