The weird science behind smart toilets and your pee

Pee could be a health goldmine. And to make the most of it, the world needs smart toilets.

That's what a new, small-scale study published in Nature this month seeks to establish: whether regular urine collection and analysis of the thousands of telling, changing indicators in our pee can reliably serve up information about a person's health.

The study's University of Wisconsin authors, Dr. Joshua Coon and Dr. Ian Miller, say more research is still needed as the 10-day experiment only had two subjects: Coon and Miller themselves. However, they also think that a non-invasive device that could collect and analyze a person's urine — like, say, a smart toilet — could work as a revolutionary tool for personalized, predictive health care.  Read more...