Toilet-based continuous health monitoring using urine

Abstract

Regular health monitoring can result in early detection of disease, accelerate the delivery of medical care and, therefore, considerably improve patient outcomes for countless medical conditions that affect public health. A substantial unmet need remains for technologies that can transform the status quo of reactive health care to preventive, evidence-based, person-centred care. With this goal in mind, platforms that can be easily integrated into people’s daily lives and identify a range of biomarkers for health and disease are desirable. However, urine — a biological fluid that is produced in large volumes every day and can be obtained with zero pain, without affecting the daily routine of individuals, and has the most biologically rich content — is discarded into sewers on a regular basis without being processed or monitored. Toilet-based health-monitoring tools in the form of smart toilets could offer preventive home-based continuous health monitoring for early diagnosis of diseases while being connected to data servers (using the Internet of Things) to enable collection of the health status of users. In addition, machine learning methods can assist clinicians to classify, quantify and interpret collected data more rapidly and accurately than they were able to previously. Meanwhile, challenges associated with user acceptance, privacy and test frequency optimization should be considered to facilitate the acceptance of smart toilets in society.