Smartwatch tracks our health. Smart toilet is also not behind

Researchers and companies are developing high-tech toilets that go beyond adding smart speakers or heated seats. These smart features are designed to watch for signs of gastrointestinal disease, monitor blood pressure, or tell you when you need to eat more fish than the comfort of your personal throne.

“All the things that come with smartwatches and phones, you can imagine on another scale,” says Joshua Koon, a bioanalytical chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research. Continuous monitoring of a person’s health by observing the molecules in their urine samples. “You can really start to understand disease risk.”

Doctors have long used stool and urine samples to track people’s health, but there has been a renewed interest in recent years as scientists begin to better understand what is in our gut. How microorganisms affect our well-being. In the COVID-19 pandemic, more communities launched wastewater monitoring initiatives, allowing health officials in cities and neighborhoods to hunt for early signs of the virus and track its spread.

Some researchers want to harness that wealth of information at the individual level and come up with models for peeking into the toilet bowl from afar. Some smart toilets are geared toward helping doctors monitor patients with chronic conditions or at increased risk for certain diseases, while other companies aim to sell the toilets – with price tags in the hundreds or thousands of dollars – directly to consumers. As a tool to track or improve. their own health and well-being.

Researchers at Stanford School of Medicine have outfitted a toilet bowl with cameras and trained machine-learning algorithms to analyze waste against a diagnostic chart. The toilet can also track the flow, color and amount of urine. It is equipped with a urine test-strip similar to a pregnancy test that detects specific molecules that can provide insight into a person’s health. To tell users apart, the toilet has a fingerprint scan when a person flushes and the features of their anus are scanned, or a rectal print.

The Stanford team has signed a deal with Korean toilet manufacturer Ijen to manufacture toilets. He hopes to have working prototypes that can be used in clinical trials by the end of this year, says Seung-min Park, who led the project, which was started by Sanjeev Gambhir, former chairman of radiology at Stanford. who died in 2020. .

Another prototype smart toilet developed at Duke University also uses cameras and machine learning to analyze waste after it has been flushed. It uses other sensors to capture consistency, the presence of blood and specific proteins, and extracts a small vial of stool that can be sent to a laboratory for further analysis. Smart toilets, along with others in development, are designed to connect to an app on a person’s phone.

“[You could] Receive personalized alerts to have more fiber or to avoid certain foods to avoid flare-ups,” says Sonia Grego, founder of Duke Smart Toilet Lab and Coprata Inc., a startup she and two other team members launched with technology in 2021. was launched for commercialization of .

A remote smart toilet could help doctors monitor patients with chronic conditions like irritable bowel syndrome or recognize early signs of illness, says Dr. Grego. Another plus is that it can allow for repeated measurements that can be tracked over time, which can be a more effective, non-invasive way to track certain metrics and can be used for doctor visits. Can quickly identify and flag changes compared to sporadic readings during

“It doesn’t matter what your blood pressure is at 2 PM on Tuesday. It’s super valuable to get that information with the real trends behind it,” says Austin McCord, chief executive officer of Kasana, a home-health monitoring startup working on a toilet seat that monitors blood pressure, blood-oxygen levels or Can measure vital signs including the heart.

The company said in February that it had raised $14 million in Series A funding and is working toward obtaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration to measure certain vital signs, Mr. McCord says.

Some diagnosticians argue that the value in a smart toilet will come from being able to analyze molecular substances in patient samples and that other devices, including smartwatches, can easily monitor blood pressure and heart rate. Mr. McCord and others working on smart-toilet technology say the advantages of using a toilet seat over any other wearable device are ease of adherence and use.

“If you want someone to use something, it has to be incredibly simple,” says Chad Adams, president and chief executive of the company Medic. Life, which is working to get FDA approval for its Medic. Love Smart Toilet. “Everyone has to go to the bathroom.”

Medic.Life plans to first sell its toilets to assisted living facilities, where it can measure residents’ vital signs, body weight or even the sugar or sodium in their urine, before expanding to general consumers. Can help track levels. A future version for assisted living facilities, pharmacies and healthcare providers will diagnose certain infections, such as urinary tract infections or COVID-19.

Google LLC also has a patent for a toilet seat that doubles as a cardiovascular monitor, filed in 2015, though it’s unclear whether the company is pursuing the project. Google Health declined to comment. Toilet maker Toto is designing a toilet that can analyze people’s waste and provide recommendations for improving health, such as drinking more water or adding something to their diet. The company expects to introduce toilets within the next several years.

Toilet makers say their products can provide medical-grade results for some vital signs and urine tests, but a smart toilet that can analyze the extensive chemical makeup of waste is likely to be discontinued. . Biochemists and diagnostic experts say developers will have to work to make toilets cost-effective, along with preparing samples for analysis and refilling the chemicals needed to drive the reaction.

Another important obstacle is privacy. A 300-person survey conducted by a Stanford team found that a third of respondents were uncomfortable with the concept of a smart toilet that collects health data, with many citing privacy as a major concern. Respondents were particularly uncomfortable with the camera-based approach. However, more than half were at least somewhat comfortable with a smart toilet.

Mr. McCord of Cassana says, “I have now heard every toilet pun or joke you can imagine. A toilet seat is something that everyone is going to laugh about, but you have the moment to explain it. That’s exactly what it does, and people really see the value there.”