Can AI Toilets Be the Next Popular Health-Tracking Device?

Artificial Intelligence has been steadily crawling into our lives for many years. With wearable devices, AI is transforming the ability to track and improve health data by measuring your heart rate, counting steps, checking the amount of calories burnt, etc. This smart technology is slowly being developed for and deployed into our toilets.

Japan has been selling and using smart toilets for a while now. With these toilets, you can get a heated seat for your comfort, a remote control that lets you flush the toilet after use, a button to push for closing the lid, and ultraviolet rays to clean the toilet and get rid of bacteria. These toilets are sold at a price ranging from $1300 to $13,000.

The Japanese firm, TOTO, was the first company ever to develop smart toilets and has mastered the art since. Kohler has also started making their own range of smart toilets which are becoming increasingly popular in the western world. However, scientists have developed something more than just a fancy toilet by using artificial intelligence.

A Toilet Makeover

In large parts of the world, though, Artificial Intelligence has been altering our homes and workspaces, but our toilets remain neglected. Now, smart toilets are seeing some development. A toilet seat developed by Rochester Institute of Technology, has the ability to measure blood oxygenation levels, heart rate, and blood pressure to signal someone if they have a risk of heart failure. TOTO developed smart toilets that can monitor blood sugar levels in urine, check body weight, temperature, and hormone levels, and send it to an app on your phone. But what if a toilet can monitor your health by checking your daily waste?!

Stool and urine samples are the most commonly used tests to diagnose illnesses. These samples can reveal a lot of illnesses such as stomach infections, kidney diseases, liver diseases, diabetes, etc. Researchers believe that analysing human waste in real time is the best way to spot any such ailments early on.

What Was the ‘need’ for a Smart Toilet?

A lot of wearable devices have been developed to share crucial medical information with a doctor, rather than just counting steps and calories. A device called AliveCor was invented with a feature that can record medical-grade electrocardiogram (EKG) and send the information to your smartphone. Medical technologies like these are aiming to make a patient’s life easier. However, smart toilets are one of the first technologies ever developed that can test a human’s gut health on a regular basis.

There are a lot of opportunities behind creating an AI-based toilet, especially when patients face a lot of stigma regarding their bowel movements. Patients of all ages tend to experience gastrointestinal symptoms, and we’re all well aware that our diet impacts our bodies at a large scale. It has now become a necessity to upgrade our toilets, given that they haven’t really been improved upon for decades.

What will a Smart Toilet Do?

Human waste consists of byproducts from bodily processes such as digestion and detoxification. Analysing the concentration of chemicals in the waste can help determine signs of illness. The new intelligent toilets will offer a diagnosis in real time with the help of built-in urine and stool monitoring sensors. The toilets will further be connected to a smartphone and the data will be sent directly to the user and even to your doctor. This would save both, your and your doctor’s time to perform further tests.

The Smart Toilet Trail

As stated above, one of the first smart toilets was developed by the Japanese firm TOTO in the 2000s. These toilets sampled urinary sugar and hormone levels. They later discontinued selling the product as there was a very low demand.

Google has been granted a patent to develop a toilet that can measure a person’s blood pressure as soon as they sit down, along with several other health-tracking benefits.

In September 2018, Panasonic released a health-tracking toilet in China that could test the urine for blood, protein, and other health indicators. The toilet also uses the armrest to measure the user’s body fat and identify users by their fingerprint.

Experts at the European Space Agency and MIT have teamed up with sanitation specialists to create the ‘FitLoo’. This high-tech lavatory will detect the presence of extra proteins and glucose by gathering data through the sensors located inside the bowl. They will detect fluctuations in the levels of these substances and the presence of any other early warning signs of cancer or diabetes.

A San Francisco-based startup, Toi Labs, has been testing ‘TrueLoo’ toilet seats in homes around the US. These seats can be attached to existing toilets and use optical sensors to scan what’s in the toilet. The goal is to analyse urine and stool for change in colour, consistency, volume, and frequency. Meanwhile, the company is also developing a smart toilet for residential use. This will replace the conventional toilet seat and handle. It will have a number of sensors under the seat. It will also have a camera and a cartridge with paper that will change colour when they come in contact with substances such as blood or sugar in urine. When the motion sensors attached to the toilet senses the person sitting down, the cartridge will slide into view and sample the urine on its way into the bowl.

Bridging the Gap

Smart toilets could pose a series of challenges to those who are manufacturing and marketing them. For starters, making them easy and reliable to use, and to find a way to connect to the customers who will find a product like this useful and appealing. Many people around the world are yet not comfortable talking about this part of their bodily functions. It will be difficult for companies to engage with those audiences. Furthermore, smart toilets may also have privacy risks as the data that will be gathered is extremely personal and needs to be kept private. This technology needs to have a very strict security system to make sure that the data doesn’t get misused.

The customers will have the urge to buy this product only when they fully understand the pros of smart toilets. Smart toilets are just like any other consumer product — as interest and demand of a product that can track health increases, more companies will jump in, to supply them. We’ve seen a lot of demand for wearable devices that track your health, so the question is, will the consumers accept smart toilets too? If Google getting the patent to develop smart toilets is any indication, it is believed that intelligent toilets will begin to be accepted in the markets. Provided that the manufacturers will make them reliable and easy to use and get rid of any privacy risks attached to the technology.