Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Smart Toilet for Crohn's?




One invention for Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis patients that would be very valuable is a toilet that can analyze bowel movements. I saw this story about a toilet that can analyze the structure of a stool and send a URL to a patient. The toilet can analyze amount of bacteria, fat, and other important information. For Crohn’s patients and ulcerative colitis patients whether or not the stool had blood and whether or not it was solid or liquid. The results could be sent via toilet to the gastroenterologist who would have that information and get alerts if they saw a patient declining in their health. Hospitals would really benefit from this if they were able to do both stool and urine analysis in patient rooms and have the information sent to the attending physician who could review it. This way hospitals wouldn’t have to waste time giving people little cups or bags to analyze urine or stools. Whenever a patient used a toilet they would be providing data to the doctor and hospital.

The type of kind of data that could be generated with this new invention I believe would help not only Crohn’s and colitis patients but everyone in general. If a toilet was able to analyze to do a urine and stool analysis people could maybe see illnesses in diseases much more in advance and go to the doctor before they got worse. The CCFA should work with toilet makers and scientists in order to develop a toilet that can analyze urine and stool at the same rate as a high grade research laboratory. We literally are flushing valuable down the toilet every day!

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