Kohler Mira’s connected bath and shower range

Bathroom fixture manufacturer Mira and its parent company Kohler Mira had previously worked with MyOxygen/ when developing their Intelligent Care range of taps and showers for schools, hospitals, and other public facilities.

Building on the lessons learned from that ongoing project, Mira now wanted to deliver what would come to be called Mira Mode. This is a spin-off, lower-cost smart tap and shower aimed at the consumer market.

• Speed to market – one of Mira’s major goals was to get to market quickly. The agile development process and rapid prototyping approach MyOxygen/ uses were almost certain to be called on.
• Connection security – because the device would rely on Bluetooth, care would need to be taken to ensure passersby could not access the shower’s features remotely and handle use cases (such as student halls of residence) where several Mode valves might be within range.

Consumer market feature set – the Intelligent Care range’s features were developed specifically for the healthcare sector. A consumer-focused set of features would include things like temperature monitoring, water pre-running, and individual family member presets, all of which needed to be implemented and tested.

• Discovery Workshops
• Native iOS & Android Mobile Apps
• MVP/Prototype
• IoT/Bluetooth Hardware

Development and testing was completed successfully in 12 months. MyOxygen/ developed a custom workflow to prevent unwanted device access, requiring someone to have physical access before they can connect using Bluetooth.

Uniquely, the connection process also eliminated the bridge device used by all other shower-connected products. Unlike the hardware bridge for the Intelligent Care line, this was developed in-house, with close collaboration between Mira and MyOxygen/ allowing for rapid implementation of changes and improvements.

Kohler Mira provided access to their world-class wet room test facility to test the consumer-focused feature set. Combined with our devops approach, this further reduced the timeframe of feature reliability, safety, and utility testing.

Some features – such as adjustable illumination to handle steamy conditions – were added during this process. Others, such as the initial proposal’s specified firmware updates via the app, were removed after thorough analysis identified them as risky operations.

The security approach was so effective that MyOxygen/ is looking to implement this kind of workflow in similar devices in future.