Finally, a Smart Toilet That Takes Photos of Your Butt
A new data-collecting smart toilet design suggests it can monitor your long-term health.
By watching what you're flushing, the toilet can measure wellness parameters.
Would you trust a toilet to upload your butt and, uh, products to the cloud?
Life isn’t confusing and degrading enough right now, so scientists from Stanford University have designed a “precision medicine” tool that measures everything on, around, or coming out of your moneymaker.
Using sensors, color detection, and more, the “smart toilet” offers a “long-term analysis of a user’s excreta through data collection and models of human health,” according to a new study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
The diagram above shows the myriad ways the smart toilet tracks your data. First, a scanner looks at your butt to identify you. A pressure sensor then times how long you sit, and how long it takes you to do your business. Another sensor monitors the breadth and force of your urine flow, while a color detector identifies if your output is in the healthy range.
Finally, the last sensor identifies the shape and nature of any solids. The diagram also shows a fingerprint sensor and a “cloud-based health portal.”
The paper has drawn attention due in part to a detailed, yet stylized graphic design of an anal sphincter seen from inside the toilet bowl, below.
When we couldn't quite figure out what we were looking at, we reached out to corresponding author Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the department of radiology and director of the molecular imaging program at Stanford, for some much-needed clarification. He obliged:
Gambhir and his colleagues' smart toilet plans to identify you in a long-term way, linking with a healthcare idea called a longitudinal record. An individual can have a longitudinal record, and groups of people can be studied in a long-term way that's also referred to as longitudinal.
These longitudinal studies are often just snapshots of different measurements over time, instead of studying any particular response, medicine, or other outside experimental stimulus. “This study type is particularly useful for evaluating the relationship between risk factors and the development of disease, and the outcomes of treatments over different lengths of time,” researchers wrote in the Journal of Thoracic Disease in 2015.
Long-term data on several parameters definitely has value, but what’s not clear is why a “smart toilet” is the answer.
In terms of biomedical engineering, it’s an interesting assemblage of different ideas in one overall device. It’s cool that we can now automate so many measurements. But the kind of person who will be able to install and use a smart toilet likely already has healthcare and access to records over a long time. It’s also hard to argue that powerful data collection like this would be limited to benevolent causes. Once the technology exists, there’s no putting it, well, back in the can.
The researchers did account for these fears in their paper. As part of their study, they offered a survey to gauge user acceptance for this kind of data-gathering toilet concept, and 300 people within the Stanford community responded to the survey. Just over 50 percent of respondents were either very comfortable or somewhat comfortable with the idea.
“The vast majority of the concerns of participants were regarding privacy protection and data security enactment in the toilet system,” the study authors write.
Scientists imagine the best use cases for what they design and hypothesize, but the reality of where and how technology is applied is often very different. Before you take a seat on a data mine, make sure you know exactly where you’re flushing your information.
You Might Also Like
