The challenge
In a commercial washroom, restocking is nobody's job. Front-of-house staff are focused on customers, management is focused elsewhere, and the person who discovers the problem is the customer. The value of solving it scales with the number of cubicles, which makes it a commercial problem rather than a domestic gadget — airports, cafes, pubs, offices. The insight predates the COVID toilet paper rush.
The work
The product family
NuRoll is a family of interconnecting products: the roll holder, the roll storage system for bulk stock, and the individual roll sensor. Together they give end-to-end visibility — what is on the holder, what is in the cupboard, and what is being consumed. The sensor mounts to whatever the paper sits on, from toilet rolls to paper towels; the holder keeps spare stock at the point of use; the storage unit houses the rest. They have to read as one product family while only the sensor carries electronics and a battery, which is why the industrial design does as much work here as the electronics.
Sensing at the edge
Sensing is optical proximity combined with an audible motion cue, rather than a rotation counter. The roll sensors are Bluetooth and battery-powered; they pair to a roll-holding unit that acts as a Bluetooth-to-Wi-Fi bridge and pushes data to AWS IoT Core. A mains-capable bridge serves the sensors in a washroom, so only the bridge needs a power source and a Wi-Fi connection.
The nu.roll app and the cloud
Devices sync to the cloud in real time and alert when it is time to restock. Stock is tracked across multiple locations and rooms through the nu.roll app on Android and iOS. Held over time, the same telemetry lets the system learn usage trends and provide predictions and analytics — a restocking schedule instead of a restocking scramble.
Where it stands
The technology is patented. Field trials are complete, in domestic homes and a local cafe. Commercialisation awaits as the research and optimisation corpus grows.
About the client
NuRoll (NuRoll Pty Ltd) is an Australian company bringing connected stock management for paper products to market: the mountable sensor, the roll holder, the storage unit, and the nu.roll app on Android and iOS.
