Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have developed a toilet seat with biometric sensors in it. The primary purpose (the Number 1 purpose?) is to monitor an individual’s cardiovascular system.
Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have developed a toilet seat with biometric sensors in it. The primary purpose (the Number 1 purpose?) is to monitor an individual’s cardiovascular system. The researcher’s company is called Heart Health Intelligence (HHI), and its target audience is hospitals and would be issued to heart failure patients after being discharged from the hospital.
These toilet seats have built-in sensors to monitor heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, and the patient’s weight and stroke volume—the amount of blood pumped at each beat. The system uses specialized algorithms to analyze the data and, the company expects, will eventually be able to send alerts to physicians about a patient’s deteriorating condition.
The seats are wireless, battery-powered, and easily cleanable. However, one problem on the current model is it doesn’t actually work while one is relieving oneself on the toilet. In an application for the device, the engineers wrote, “In future in-home studies, algorithms will be developed to identify and reject periods of urination and defecation through classification of motion artifacts and the physiologic shifts associated with this change in state.”
On the other hand, since everyone uses a toilet on a very regular basis, compliance would not be an issue.
“Typically, within 30 days of hospital discharge, 25 percent of patients with congestive heart failure are readmitted,” stated Nicholas Conn, a postdoctoral fellow at RIT and founder and chief executive officer of Heart Health Intelligence. “After 90 days of hospital discharge, 45 percent of patients are readmitted. And the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is penalizing hospitals for readmitting patients for heart failure.”
Building a financial case for the toilet seats, Conn notes that per national average readmission rates, the penalty for readmitting 150 patients comes to about $500,000 annually. On the other hand, the total cost of providing 150 patients with the smart toilet seats from HHI would come to $200,000. That comes to about $1,333 and change for each smart toilet seat.
HHI joined the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Venture Creations business incubator earlier this year. It is now working to advance the product, writing grants, conducting human-subject tests and preclinical studies.
There are already smart toilets—who knew?—that analyze what ends up in the toilet bowl. The HHI device is less interested in what goes into the toilet than who is sitting on it.
“This cardiovascular monitoring system is designed to detect deterioration early, while bypassing the need for patient adherence, by using a unique form factor: a toilet seat,” Conn told Digital Trends. “The seat is directly enabled by advanced proprietary algorithms, and captures over nine clinically relevant measurements. It incorporates a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) for measuring the electrical activity of the heart, a photoplethysmogram (PPG) for measuring blood oxygenation and localized pulse timing, a ballistocardiogram (BCG) for measuring the mechanical forces associated with the cardiac cycle, and a body weight sensor.”
In a recent test with 38 healthy volunteers and 111 heart patients at the University of Rochester Medical Center, the smart toilet seat collected and analyzed heart measurements as effectively as hospital-standard monitoring equipment. The results of that study have been published in the JMIR mHealth and uHealth.
Patients wouldn’t have to install an entirely new toilet, just the cloud-connected seat.
The field of wearable medical devices is hot right now, and you could probably view this smart toilet seat as a variation on that theme. Researchers at Stanford University recently presented results at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology of 419,297 people wearing an Apple Watch to determine if the wearable devices could accurately identify irregular heart rhythms, including potentially serious conditions such as atrial fibrillation.
The study had a high rate of false positives but showed promise in the medical use of wearable devices. The study also used an earlier version of the Apple Watch, not the most recent iteration released last fall, the Series 4 Watch. The Series 4 has a built-in electrocardiogram that required clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
According to a Juniper Research report, the market for health trackers and remote patient monitoring devices in the “wearables” arena will generate revenues of over $40 billion by 2022, with the overall market hitting $60 billion by 2023.
It’s not completely clear if a smart toilet seat would fall into the wearable niche, but it would fall into the health tracker and remote patient monitoring market.
Conn says, “The next step for the project is to demonstrate the clinical utility of the system by deploying to the homes of [heart failure] patients after discharge, and providing data to heart failure management teams to enable better disease management and improve outcomes, such as the functional status of these patients.”
