Newsmax Few think of the toilet as a font of valuable information, outside what you might read while you’re sitting on the throne.
But a “smart toilet” is being developed that will help track your health by analyzing your excretions, researchers say.
The toilet would be fitted with technology that can detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine, said Seung-min Park, a senior research scientist with the Stanford University School of Medicine, in California
That data could be forwarded to your doctor, who would track changes that might provide clues to such diseases as cancer, kidney failure, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome.
“We’re trying to monitor every aspect of human health that can be detected from human excretion,” Park said.
It might sound far-fetched, but such information would prove a boon to doctors and the patients they treat, said Dr. Brian Rubin, chair of the Cleveland Clinic’s Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Institute.
“We currently don’t have access to continuous genetic data that’s pouring out of feces and urine,” Rubin said. “But we do know that a variety of nucleic acids and proteins are secreted in urine and fecal material, and they do provide insight into what’s going on in the human body. It’s the kind of thing that could really take medicine to the next level.”
Stanford’s smart toilet design uses cameras, motion sensors and chemical tests to check different indicators of your health:
