Scientists are giving a smart makeover to a toilet – but this time it’s more than heated seats or bidet attachments. According to The Wall Street Journal, researchers from the Stanford School of Medicine are working on a scanner that can recognize the person by their “anal print” or “distinctive features of their anoderm.”
To make this happen, the researchers have placed a camera inside a toilet bowl and used machine learning algorithms to match stool samples to differentiate between users. The system is capable of calculating “the flow rate and volume of urine with the aid of computer vision as a uroflowmeter,” according to the team’s 2020 paper.
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If the users have privacy concerns about all this, the researchers say the data is all “stored and analyzed in an encrypted cloud server.”
Sonia Grego, the co-founder of Coprata, a Duke University-affiliated physiological monitoring startup, aims to change the way everyone does their morning business by scanning samples of their stool and urine for health indicators, including chronic diseases and even cancer, reports The Guardian.
Another firm called Toi Labs, took this idea a notch further by collecting an even broader selection of biometrics. “What do they weigh? How are they sitting on the seat?” founder Vik Kashyap told The Guardian. The toilet seat can analyze stool samples “using optical methods, looking at things like the volume, clarity, consistency, color.”
Aimed at elderly folks
The new toilet seat is mostly aimed at older people with health issues.
“It’s essentially understanding when someone has abnormal patterns and then it’s capable of documenting those patterns and providing reports that can be used by physicians to help in the treatment of a variety of conditions,” Kashyap told The Guardian.
But just like other IoT products, there lie concerns about a data breach. Many users “wouldn’t, for very good reasons, like cameras pointing up their bottoms,” Phil Booth, the coordinator of MedConfidential, told The Guardian.
