POO DUNNIT?
Smart toilet could scan your poo and pee for disease
Call it the iPlop. Scientists have invented a toilet that analyses your number ones and twos to look for signs of disease.
Developed by a team at Stanford University, the device is an ordinary toilet thatos Deen fitted Yith health monitoring
gadgets inside the bowl.
When you use the smart loo, your urine and stools are captured on video, which is processed by a set of algorithms. These look for anything strange, such as unusual stool consistency Wrine floY rate or Wrine
volume. Meanwhile, ‘dipstick tests’ in the bowl measure 10 different biomarkers in the urine. These are things such as proteins and white blood cells that can flag Wp certain health proDlems inclWding
infection, bladder cancer and kidney failure. If the loo detects any problems, it could send an alert to the user’s healthcare team, who would then be able to access the data Xia a secWre cloWd Dased system
The toilet also includes a rather unusual means of identification p6he Yhole point is to provide precise, individualised health feedback, so we needed to make sure the toilet could discern between users,” said team leader Dr Sanjiv Gambhir.
So the toilet uses a scanner that scans… Yell Yeoll let )amDhir explain p9e knoY
it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique,” said Gambhir.
Gambhir and his team have so far tested the techno loo on 21 XolWnteers oXer
the course of several months. A paper describing their research is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Looking forward, they’re working on individualising the tests, so that someone with diabetes, say, could have their urine monitored for glucose, while someone who’s genetically predisposed to bladder cancer might be monitored for blood in the urine. They also hope to develop molecular analysis for stool samples. p6hatos a Dit trickier DWt Yeore Yorking toYard it q said )amDhir p6he smart toilet is the perfect way to harness a source of data that’s typically ignored – and the user doesn’t have to do anything differently.”