A bar, Tokyo, someone else’s seat stain.

The Future of Sewage Epidemiology


The blue rinse in this Tokyo bar is a familiar sight, but ultimately could be so much more.

Conversations about toilets in Japan gravitate to the technologies they employ: under-seat lighting to support accurate night-time target acquisition; bacteria neutralising porcelain for the inevitable splash back; music players for the ladies to mask the sound of impact; heated seats to counter the lack of central heating in most Japanese homes; the power jets that can pleasure and the complexity of the remote control user interface.

Novel enough, but ultimately these are all a side show to the main event: the real time analysis and of what we urinate and excrete.

Roger Ibars has written about reflective moments those pauses in the flow of everyday tasks that provide an opportunity to, well, reflect and gauge your current status. Glancing at the colour of one’s pee is such a moment (more so for men than women who are more likely to tissue).

Consider the range of what can be tested from urine and stool samples to understand what can be monitored. There-in lies the challenge for tomorrows service designers: what information to feedback, to whom, and in what format?

Which is why the light blue rinse is an indicator of what is yet to pass. The colour of the liquid in the toilet bowl will be the most commonly used mechanism to feedback relatively minor but good-to-know status updates about the state of your body, a simply chemical adaptation of what many of you already do today. The critical stuff will sent directly to your doctor/insurance company, so that they can break the news to you gently, unless of course you think you can handle staring down at a blood red toilet bowl.

Opulent effluence, swanky hotel Singapore.

The bigger picture is this. Your employer will be offered lower premiums when they install and allow the remote monitoring of your insurance company sponsored washroom. Paparazzi will use hacked sewer inspecting robots to monitor the effluence of of media-interest-targets for signs of pregnancy and disease. And sewage epidemiology will travel up the pipe to the bowl.


The author is the founder of Studio D Radiodurans, a consultancy that thrives in challenging environments.