Of all the things tech companies could slap an artificial intelligence into, the toilet bowl is the last thing that comes to mind. But these so-called “smart toilets” will reportedly be able to diagnose your state of health and risk of disease by analyzing your bodily waste.

To put it simply, a smart toilet can perform fecal analysis and urine analysis. These are two of the most commonly-used conventional tests to determine the well-being of a patient.

Solid and liquid bodily waste are made up of all kinds of byproducts from bodily processes such as digestion and detoxification. The concentrations of these chemical compounds can show if there is anything amiss.

Furthermore, a lot of microorganisms end up in fecal matter. Some of them may have started their journey from your mouth. Others would normally live in your stomach or, more likely, your gut. Like the above-mentioned compounds, the various bacteria, fungi, and other microbes in your feces offer clues about the microbiota in your body.

Proponents of smart toilets claim the devices will save you time and money that you would otherwise spend on a visit to a healthcare provider. They leave out the part where AI are intruding on your toilet, one of the last bastions of privacy in the home – unless you bring a mobile device or smart gadget with you. (Related: Big Tech’s censorship is leading to “the takeover of humanity”.)

Your smart toilet will automatically analyze your feces and urine

“Medicine is going toward precision medicine and precision health,” claimed Sanjay Mehrotra, the chief executive officer of Micron Technology. “Imagine smart toilets in the future that will be analyzing human waste in real time every day.”

Mehrotra is one of the prominent figures at the Techonomy 2018 conference in San Francisco, California. His company, Micron, manufactures memory chips that provide processing power for the machine algorithms in smartphones, data servers, and every electronic in between.

“You don’t need to be going to visit a physician every six months,” he said regarding the accuracy and reliability of a smart toilet’s diagnosis. “If any sign of disease starts showing up, you’ll be able to catch it much faster because of urine analysis and stool analysis.”

Artificial intelligence technology employ neural networks that are patterned after the human brain and thought processes. They are trained on huge amounts of data that are drawn from the real world.

Just like humans learn from experience, AI will eventually learn what to look for. It will be able to catch the signs of diabetes in snapshots of the human retina, spot minute differences between separate X-ray scans, and perform other tasks.

Artificial intelligence outperforms trained health professionals and lung specialists

Researchers at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) are some of those people who are entrusting these robots with important jobs. They reported that their thoroughly-trained computer algorithm can analyze the symptoms of a respiratory disease and issue the right diagnosis.

In their experiment, they trained the AI on the pulmonary function tests of 1,430 patients. These tests provide a lot of information on the lungs, but their results need to be interpreted. They then compared the diagnoses of the robot doctor with the opinion of a panel of 120 human experts.

Based on the results, the artificial intelligence was able to interpret the tests with practically perfect accuracy. Furthermore, it also made the right diagnosis in 82 percent of the cases, while the human experts only managed 45 percent.

The KUV Leuven researchers believe such robot doctors can provide health experts with a second opinion during the assessment and diagnosis of patients. They suggest putting well-trained AI in primary care to learn from general practitioners.

Sources include:

CNet.com

ScienceDaily.com