Stanford is Going Down the Toilet

(Stanford Medical News)

The headline is literal, not metaphorical.

It’s a smart toilet. But not the kind that lifts its own lid in preparation for use; this toilet is fitted with technology that can detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine, including those of some cancers, such as colorectal or urologic cancers. The device could be particularly appealing to individuals who are genetically predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer or kidney failure, and want to keep on top of their health...

[The late Dr. Sanjiv] Gambhir’s toilet is an ordinary toilet outfitted with gadgets inside the bowl. These tools, a suite of different technologies, use motion sensing to deploy a mixture of tests that assess the health of any deposits. Urine samples undergo physical and molecular analysis; stool assessment is based on physical characteristics.

The toilet automatically sends data extracted from any sample to a secure, cloud-based system for safekeeping. In the future, Gambhir said, the system could be integrated into any health care provider’s record-keeping system for quick and easy access.

(WSJ image)

Companies are already working on bringing smart toilets to market: [bold added]

Some smart toilets are geared toward helping doctors monitor patients with chronic conditions or heightened risk for certain diseases, whereas other companies aim to sell the toilets—with price tags in the hundreds or thousands of dollars—directly to consumers as a tool to track or improve their own health and wellness.

Researchers at Stanford School of Medicine have outfitted a toilet bowl with cameras and trained a machine-learning algorithm to analyze the waste against a diagnostic chart. The toilet can also track the flow, color and volume of urine. It is equipped with a urine test-strip similar to a pregnancy test that detects specific molecules that can provide insight into a person’s health. To tell users apart, the toilet has both a fingerprint scan when a person flushes and a scan of their anus’s characteristics, or an anal print.

No doubt we'll have to suffer through smart-toilet humor as these products are rolled out. Once we get those out of our system, market acceptance should be rapid--no more taking stool samples, toddlers will enjoy toilet-training games, instantaneous feedback on a variety of health indicators, etc.

But "anal printing"? That is where I draw the line.