I have been kicking this idea around for years and am only now finally publishing something about it.  The title really tells it all.  The next big thing?  Sure.  You poop in a toilet every day, so let’s make a toilet that crowd sources medical and related data to tell you how you are doing.

(I know we use toilets for urine as well, and everything I am saying here about poop should be thus extended to urine as well.)

I suppose it will need a sort of garbage disposal or blender component.  It would presumably work from assays of your excrement, and make whatever various tests or analyses it will be capable of doing (which ought to increase over time).

Currently there are a number of states we can assess from human excrement.  I don’t know them well enough to list them all here, but things that come quickly to mind are pregnancy, some kinds of cancer, kidney issues, bowel issues, &c.

Imagine how this smart toilet might make various important measures each time you use it.  It would know you are you based on your account.  It would catalog everyone in a poop database.  This data could be made available to the medical community.  This could be done both specifically (your doctor could be allowed to access your data) and generally (your data would be part of the big data that researchers could use to further our knowledge and advance our research projects).

It could alert and advise things such as “you should have your kidneys checked and refer to test xxxx when you do” or “you should do a pregnancy test” directly to your smart phone (or whatever method you might choose).

Now lest you think I’ve gone mad (or think this is just one more data point in a long line trending toward madness), here is a great video concerning human gut biology in which the speaker specifically mentions a smart toilet!  Yay, me!  (He mentions the toilet at about 50:30 but the whole talk is quite excellent.)

Have fun out there!  Keep pooping!