Smart toilets may soon become as common in every home as smartphones are common in most people’s hands. The smart toilets will analyze the poop deposited into them and automatically evaluate the health statuses of the user. The smart toilets will determine if a user has diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, cardiovascular ailments and other infections.
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates mooted the idea of smart toilets at the toilet expo in Beijing in late 2018, saying high-tech toilets will revolutionalize waste sanitation all over the world. But that would not be the first time smart toilets would catch the attention of sanitation experts. Japanese companies in the early 1980s first developed and sold high-efficiency toilets that could play music when sat upon, clean up the user and heat up seats to provide personal comfort.
The European Union later funded the iToilet project which provided motorized toilets that work by voice commands to adjust position or detect a fall. A Japanese company, Toto, developed a toilet that analyzed the urine of the user to detect bladder or prostate problems among other health abnornalities.
Sameer Berry, a gastroenterologist in Los Angeles, published an essay on toilet technology predicting that internet-connected toilets may soon be available to analyze waste products for early signs of diseases and unknown health conditions. The Toilet Board Coalition thinks smart toilets could be of immense benefits to public health in alerting local health officials of diseases before they become epidemics such as Ebola.
Considering that many ailments are detectable in urine and feces, smart toilet manufacturers are positive that toilet wastes contain lots of data about users’ current health. And unlike smartwatches and other wearable health trackers, smart toilets do not need to be charged in any way or worn on the body to function. Just use and it will monitor your health status in the background.
Toto even released smart toilets that monitored hormonal and urinary sugar levels in the early 2000s. Google recently obtained patent for a toilet that evaluates user’s blood sugar and other vital signs when they seat on it. And in September 2018, Panasonic unveiled a toilet that monitors blood presence, protein and other indicators from users’ urine; and the toilet could equally measure an individual’s body fat and differentiate users with their fingerprints.
Vikram Kashyap, CEO and founder of Toi Labs in San Francisco, is taking smart toilets to another level with his TrueLoo toilets which use optical sensors to scan poop and urine for abnormalities in color, consistency, volume and frequency as well as chemically evaluate poop for given infections.