Can ‘Smart Toilets’ Be The Next Health Data Wellspring?

This graphic illustrates how an integrated “smart toilet” system might work as a real-time method of monitoring health. While the application may be years away, proof of principle is being developed in the lab of Professor Joshua Coon.

Credit: Dasom (Somi) Hwang, Joshua Coon Lab at the UW-Madison Department of Biomolecular Chemistry

The next step: The Coon Research Group is designing a toilet that will incorporate a portable mass spectrometer that can recognize the individual and process samples across a variety of subjects. They plan to install the toilet in their research building and expand the user group to a dozen or more subjects. Coon says the design is “a bit Rube Goldberg-like” but functional.

“We know in the lab we can make these measurements,” says Coon. “And we’re pretty sure we can design a toilet that could sample urine. I think the real challenge is we’re going to have to invest in the engineering to make this instrument simple enough and cheap enough. That’s where this will either go far or not happen at all.”

While the pilot experiment didn’t examine health questions, many possibilities exist. For example, testing could show how an individual metabolizes certain types of prescription drugs, in ways that could be healthy or dangerous. Also, as the population gets older with more stay-at-home care, urine tests would indicate whether medications are being taken properly and having their intended effect.

Coon also believes the “smart toilet” concept could have major population health implications, not unlike the National Institutes of Health “All of Us” human genome database. “If you had tens of thousands of users and you could correlate that data with health and lifestyle, you could then start to have real diagnostic capabilities,” he says. It might provide early warning of viral or bacterial outbreaks.

Coon, who runs the National Center for Quantitative Biology of Complex Systems, says the idea of meta-scale urine testing has intrigued him for some time. “Josh mentioned this at a group meeting one time and it was met with laughter,” Miller recalls. “I thought, you know, I kind of like the idea. I already track a lot this stuff in my everyday life.”

Adds Coon: “So we went out and bought a couple coolers and started collecting.”

While the mass spec small molecule analyses are being done on $300,000 machines, Coon says that portable mass spec technologies exist at a tenth of that cost. He says that with a market this massive, they could eventually hit a reasonable cost threshold.

“Almost every automobile on the road is more complicated than that portable mass spectrometer,” he says.

Contacts and sources:
Brian Mattmiller
Morgridge Institute for Research

 

Citation:Real-time health monitoring through urine metabolomics. Ian J. Miller, Sean R. Peters, Katherine A. Overmyer, Brett R. Paulson, Michael S. Westphall, Joshua J. Coon. npj Digital Medicine, 2019; 2 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41746-019-0185-y