What do you think of the idea of a toilet that, based on what you excrete, automatically gives you advice on how to eat healthier, or detects early symptoms of disease? Unbelievable? Creepy? Maybe a bit of both? Well, in principle, such a toilet already exists, it's just not yet clear when it will actually be in use!
One of the manufacturers of toilets is for the fair CES 2021 created the smart toilet of the future. Japanese manufacturer of toiletries, bidets and cleaning products Toto, thus presented a new concept for the "wellness toilet".
With use "several state-of-the-art detection technologies" would track and analyze the person's every time they sat on the toilet "mental and physical condition", it is written in the press release. I would then send this information to application, to provide recommendations to the user. An example that Toto gives is that when he detects an "unbalanced diet", he suggests other foods to eat.
"It's a concept," said Ryoji Nakamura, Toto's head of digital innovation. "We cannot reveal everything. But what I can explain is that in this wellness toilet concept, we will use multiple sensing technologies to detect health-related information. For example, stress, physical fitness and general body condition.” Nakamura also said that some of the other things that the toilet will collect will also smell and blood flow, but did not provide more details on how it would actually perform these measurements. There is also no set timeline for when this concept would come to fruition and how much it might cost.
Photo: TOTO
"The real challenge we face is how to flush the technology that exists in academic research labs into the toilet so that we can provide the same - or good enough - data at a price that people can afford," he said Joshua Coon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studied gleaning insights into metabolism from human waste. "It's a real challenge and I'm not sure if Toto has figured out how to solve it."
Toto is not alone in his efforts. Several academic groups and companies are working on analyzing human feces. In addition to establishing the cost of installing a mini lab in a toilet, companies that want to provide viable products must also undergo years of testing. This requires time and money.
"A lot of evidence needs to be presented for the new method of analysis to be truly credible," said Vik Kashyap, founder of Toi Labs. "Building a toilet for the future is not as easy as it might seem."
But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Coon said dietary or exercise counseling based on monitoring human waste "not science fiction". So the only challenge is how to install all these tools in the toilet.
