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April 11, 2020 12:02 am

A Smart Toilet Could Identify You By Your 'Analprint' and Detect Diseases

A prototype smart toilet that can identify you by your "analprint" and monitor your trip to the loo has been created by researchers at Stanford University. It's equipped with cameras and sensors that collect information on your bodily waste, and it uses that data to look for any health issues you might have. The Verge reports: The "analprint" is the toilet's primary way of identifying each user. Much to the authors' dismay, it's also the aspect of the toilet that's gotten the most attention since the paper describing the proto-toilet was published in a press release and the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering on Monday. The idea for an analprint was sparked by Salvador Dali, who discovered that "the anus has 35 or 37 creases, which are as unique as fingerprints," Park wrote in a blog post. The prototype device -- which is modular and can be attached to most standard toilets -- uses a Raspberry Pi paired with a camera to capture each person's unique analprint as they sit down to use the toilet, ensuring the data it captures is associated with the correct person. The real action happens after the person sits down, according to Park. Inside the toilet, there are cameras to capture images of the person and their waste, motion sensors to detect urine streams, and medical sensors to analyze what's inside the excrement. To further distinguish an individual, the smart toilet also includes a fingerprint scanner on the lever. The smart toilet uses an algorithm to determine "urodynamics," which analyzes the flow rate, magnitude, and stream time of each participant's urine to determine their general health and if they have a bladder infection. Participants' stool was also classified using the "Bristol Stool Form Scale." The first prototype smart toilet can detect constipation and infections, "but the eventual goal is to spot any severe health problems like colon cancer," the report says. It notes that the data and images that are collected "are stored in an encrypted cloud server, which is supposed to keep the information private."

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