Time for all of those lazy husbands to pick up their laundry baskets and begin the wash job. The traditional image of the wife doing all the laundry at home while her husband disappears has come to an end.

A washing machine called "Your Turn" will not let the same person use it twice in a row. It uses fingerprint recognition technology to ensure the job of loading is not dumped on just one individual.

Your Turn requires both partners to register their fingerprints on the sensor while it is hooked up to their home computer. When the sensor is plugged into the washing machine, the software will only allow the wash program to start if a different finger is placed on it each time.

Designer Pep Torres was approached by Spanish Store 'Servei Estacio' to come up with an innovative Father's Day gift. "Spain is changing a lot, and I wanted to come up with an invention to enable men who don't do anything around the house except drink beer, to do more." said Torres, from the creativity agency DeBuenaTinta in Barcelona.

So what about the cheats-how can you get round that? The only way to override the system is to crawl around the back of the machine, unplug the sensor, take it back to the home computer and re-program it-it's not that easy. "We have to make it difficult to change otherwise it defeats the object of the exercise", he said.

And there is one bone of contention. The finger print sensor only controls who starts the program. In future designs, Torres hopes to bring the door release mechanism under the thumb of the fingerprint sensor, too.

Jasmine Kaur

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