HOW SMART IS A SMART TOILET?

One Stanford researcher wants your toilet to be the Fitbit of poop. Your waste might be more valuable than you think.

- MAGDALENA PUNIEWSKA

HOW SOON IS too soon for two strangers to look at pictures of poop together? Because Seung-min Park, Ph.D., and I just met 20 minutes ago, and we're now scrolling through the "poop" subreddit.

Park is an instructor and biomedical engineer in the urology department at Stanford University, and he's also the lead inventor of a new kind of toilet that connects to an app and offers direct feedback on the health and makeup of your pee and poop-a smart toilet. The photos he's showing me aren't a gross way to make a point. Park fed nearly 30,000 of them to the artificial-intelligence technology that will be linked to the smart toilet so it could learn to recognize healthy versus unhealthy number ones and twos.

On its brilliantly white and very clean surface, Park's smart toilet doesn't look like anything special: On the outside, it's pretty much like the one you already have at home. But look closer and it's blinged out with LED lights, cameras, and even a fingerprint scanner on the handle. Together, all these tools will collect health data and alert you if something's up on the corresponding app. There's a lot of information we can dig up from urine and stool, but we're just flushing it away, he tells me.

That data could reveal basic health hiccups such as dehydration, urinary tract infections (UTIS), and kidney stones. And the info could also alert you to more serious stuff, like colon and prostate cancers, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and even Covid. And Park isn't the only one after this data: Bowl analytics are having a bit of an arms race at the moment. Researchers at Duke are also working on a smart toilet that will screen stool for biomarkers that can point to colon cancer, IBS, and other health issues, and the Japanese company Toto says it'll have one on the market in a few years.