Smart Toilet Seat – Because Smart Everything
You almost certainly have a smartphone. There is a good chance you have a smartwatch. Maybe you even have other parts of your home smartyfied - but would you like to have a smart toilet seat?
Image by Thomas Malyska from Pixabay
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The journal Nature recently published a research paper with the unnecessarily long name A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta. To translate it into human – A smart toilet seat that studies your poop. This smart toilet seat is easily attachable to your toilet and should help you stay healthy.
The system analyzes urine and excrement and based on the result it evaluates the health state of its user. The system is modular, works quietly in the background examining its samples to put its findings onto the cloud.
Smart Toilet Seat
The point of a smart toilet seat is the fact that unlike smart wearables you do not take it off. Everyone uses a toilet and that increases the chances of the smart toilet seat to detect diseases.
Now, maybe you asked yourself the question – What if more people use the toilet? - that is why the creators of the smart toilet seat added a fingerprint reader. And one more and maybe somewhat strange way to identify the user – a camera inside the device that recognizes the user based on its anus. Yes. The anus. It may sound strange but each person has a unique anus – similarly to a fingerprint – and the device can recognize it. Obviously, these images are not stored in the cloud.
Based on your fingerprint and the camera anus identification the system will assign the samples to a user. And thanks to periodic analysis of the samples it can warn the users of a possible health problem as many diseases do affect your excrement.
Thorough Analysis
The urine analysis monitors several markers such as the speed of the flow. Biochemical tests watch the number of white blood cells, signs of blood contamination of the urine, problematic levels of protein, and other biomarkers. Based on the data gathered common illnesses such as urinary tract infection can be detected but also more serious problems such as kidney failure.
The smart toilet sends and saves data onto a secure cloud server. But over time the creators would like to give access to the data to healthcare providers that would then get the chance to better treat their patients.
The concept was tested for several months on 21 participants while 10 different biomarkers were observed. A larger clinical study will be next in which the scientists will further test the effectiveness of the smart toilet.
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