Forget about smartphones, here comes smart toilets

Marcus Rentziperis | Lariat News

Sonia Grego, the founding director of the Duke Smart Toilet Lab, for the past 10 years has been looking to change the toilet design, focused on bringing health information to people. Grego, the co-founder of Coprara, which is a company that wants to develop technologies that monitor your health, wants to make a toilet that will analyze people’s waste to collect health data for the individual. 

“We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool,” Grego tells Emine Saner of The Guardian.  

The toilet has not changed much since its conception. The only things that have changed, in terms of luxury toilets, are that they have bidets or heated seats, but nothing that can truly improve your life. 

With the smart toilet, Pratt School of Engineering is focused on these key areas of research, including a hands-free device, collection of waste for analysis, technology for tracking of bowel movement characteristics and pathogen surveillance to detect any form of diseases. 

 This isn’t the only form of smart toilet that has been made. In 2018, Panasonic made a toilet in China that would test urine and track the body fat of users. So, what else could they do with toilets? 

Analprints! 

Researchers at Stanford School of Medicine have teamed up with Izen, a Korean toilet company to develop a toilet that can differentiate the users. With sensors, they will take a print of the user’s anoderm and take a print, just like how you unlock your phone with your fingerprint, now you have a personalized toilet. 

Of course, this brings up privacy concerns. What if your school or workplace had these toilets that let them see your health based on urine or stool samples, including a scan of your behind. It is just as weird as going to the bathroom and seeing your boss reach into the bowl and take whatever you just did. Parents might use toilets to test the children, if they are on drugs. 

There are many instances where this kind of technology can be invasive. Think of what your insurance companies could do if they had access to that information. Yet on their own, in a private home, these can be amazing for users that might not catch onto something fast enough and be able to measure nutrient intake. A smart toilet might be another form of pregnancy test or finding a parasite that is in your body before it can do future harm.     

With homes becoming more and more “smart,” with being able to control your lights, locks and appliances from your phone it is only a matter of time before the toilet is tampered with, but it is the integration into society that we must watch out for. It will not be a long time before we see these as an exceptional part of your home as they are expensive and still being researched.

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