Nintendo quietly kills the Wii Vitality Sensor peripheral

Nintendo made a splash in the healthy lifestyle market with their Wii Fit product, however we haven’t heard about that other product, if you even remember it, in quite some time. Yes, I’m talking about the Wii Vitality Sensor, a Wii peripheral announced all the way back in 2009 that would have “sensed the user’s pulse” and other bodily signals – a perfect fit with the Wii Fit.

Unfortunately, the product has seemingly been in limbo since then, with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata occasionally promising that the device is still incoming. Well, it’s been about a year or so since our last update on the Vitality Sensor, and now Mr. Iwata has confirmed what we’ve all long expiated – the Vitality Sensor is dead.

Iwata claims that the reason for the demise of the peripheral stems from the fact that it only worked accurately on about “90 out of 100” of all people due to the biological differences from person to person. For Iwata, this success rate was unacceptable, saying that he would only bring the product to market if it was successful with “1,000 of 1,000 people” – and thus, so goes the Wii Vitality Sensor. In the age of the Wii U and the decline of the Wii, it would have been a product for yesterday going on sale today, so it’s likely Nintendo would never have seen the sort of success with the Vitality Sensor that they were hoping for anyways. But still, long live the Wii Vitality Sensor.