Can not be cheaper in the sewer.
文 | 秘丛丛
Edit | Huang Wei Zhang Wei
“Hi, here is your medical report and medical advice.” Soon after, you may hear the toilet say this to you.
For many people, the smart toilet is already an amazing upgrade for the toilet. Compared with before, it has added a variety of functions, such as toilet lid heating, warm water washing, warm air drying, sterilization and so on.
But this kind of intelligence is still relatively low-level, and today’s smart toilets can already be used as a data sensor and a small “inspection department”, which has a say in people’s health. This kind of toilet does not change people’s original toilet habits, but integrates multiple analysis and detection modules and chips on the hardware. Then the health management platform (such as the app on the mobile phone) will provide users with health consultation services based on specific data.
This is the application direction of the current smart toilets in China. The smart toilets developed by Geometry Technology belong to this category. While foreign countries mainly focus on the development of single-point technology, not long ago, researchers at American universities showed a toilet seat that can monitor the heart.
“Smart Toilets are the perfect entry point for home health monitoring. One is ease of use and applicability, and on the other hand, the trend of electrical appliances in the toilet makes it more and more relevant to electrical testing. It is more and more closely related to people’s lives. There is no better way to replace it to monitor human body data.” Chen Liangcheng, founder and CEO of Geometry Technology, said that the domestic smart toilet market is blue ocean, subdivided into The smart toilet with health monitoring function is a complete blue ocean market.
Image from kanpai-japan
The toilet that can “help”
Using the toilet to monitor human body data, is it really ok?
As a gastroenterologist in a medical center in the United States, Sameer Berry believes that patients are 99% of the time outside the clinic, and the patient’s data is mostly collected from the hospital. There are very few devices that can help patients continuously monitor and share intestinal health information.
“The toilet is a good solution to this problem.” Samir said, For patients, health data is automatically monitored and monitored continuously when using the toilet. From the doctor’s point of view, even basic data on feces and urine is very valuable. “Doctors and patients will benefit,” he added.
In fact, the toilet has achieved monitoring of the heart. In March, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the United States developed a smart toilet seat monitoring system for heart disease. The study says, this device is measuring the human body Blood pressure, peripheral blood oxygen, and stroke volume have reached clinical levels.
Image courtesy of: Rochester Institute of Technology
Initially, they considered embedding the sensor in the mouse or steering wheel, but later realized that patients with advanced cardiovascular disease might not use these devices often.
Unlike wearable devices that require charging, the toilet seat does not need to change the patient’s habits. People’s daily hygiene life is as usual, except that the toilet collects data and regularly monitors during this process. And because of the substantial skin contact, it can read the data more accurately.
“In addition to monitoring heart failure, the collected data is also useful for understanding heart health and other cardiovascular diseases,” said Nicholas Conn, principal developer of the smart cushion. In order to achieve better landing, he founded Heart Health Intelligence.
The increasing demand for data on family health is driving the development of the home healthcare market. The first thing to solve is the problem of recording daily body data.
In the United States, for example, Nicholas believes that people do not have the strength to record their health. “Only 9% of patients with heart failure can monitor symptoms on a daily basis, and 14% will weigh themselves every day,” and these are all doctors’ advice. In this comparison, the toilet highlights its instrumental advantage – automatic collection is more efficient and continuous. With personal accurate data, it can also solve some pain points in the existing medical system.
“According to data surveys, only about 1 in 8 drugs are effective.” Ge Zhen, co-founder of Geometry Technology, believes that this has long been the result of a holistic approach. “In the future, personalized continuous and accurate monitoring will be the core of medicine.” This will also become the driving point of precision medicine.
Current toilets not only monitor heart disease, but also detect early signs of cancer and diabetes by monitoring urine. In 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the FitLoo. This is a high-tech toilet that monitors the early warning of cancer by checking the amount of protein and glucose in the urine and the sensors in the intestines. This test also designed the toilet to be connected to the mobile app. If abnormal data is found, you can contact the hospital for more detailed testing, butThe former FitLoo is still in the experimental stage.
In addition to analyzing urine and feces, the data analysis potential of smart toilets is enormous. In the monitoring and monitoring of chronic diseases, such as hypertension and diabetes, as the level of data accumulation increases, the smart toilet will play the role of “diagnosis” assistant. Samir believes that , smart toilets are ideal places to capture daily measurements, such as blood pressure, body fat and weight, and will not increase the workload for patients.
The business of the toilet
Next, health monitoring may be standard on every toilet, and toilets or toilets are expected to be the health data platform for future home IoT.
The big companies have already started to act.
At the CES in 2019, the American bathroom brand Kohler (KOLER) allowed the voice assistant Alexa to enter the bathroom, supporting voice-activated toilets, smart bath mirrors and so on. This will really affect the daily lives of ordinary people, especially in the supervision of patients and the elderly.
Numi 2.0 Smart Toilet (picture from Kohler)
Google announced the bathroom patent as early as 2016. In its description, the smart bathroom in the future will be equipped with an ultrasonic bath and a pressure sensing toilet for comprehensive cardiovascular health testing. In addition, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) applied for a patent for a pressure-sensing toilet seat (for measuring blood pressure) in 2015.
Google Toilet Patent
As the red pusher of the toilet, some big Japanese companies are not willing to be on the intelligent track. For example, the Japanese manufacturer Toto and Matsushita (now part of Panasonic) have designed a toilet that can be connected to Wi-Fi, and can analyze urine and feces, and can measure body mass index, body biochemical composition (sugar, protein) and urine. Liquid temperature, etc.
The domestic start-ups geometric technology are also the players of this track. Chen Liangcheng, CEO of Geometry Technology, said: “Compared with 80% of smart toilets in Japan, China is only about 20%.” In his view, from the hardware point of view, China’s smart toilets (health monitoring) are also 100 billion. market.
However, most of the smart toilets currently used for data processing are still in the research stage. From scientific research to large-scale commercialization, there is a long distance in the middle. Taking Heart Health Intelligence as an example, its next focus will be through FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) approval, and its CEO forecast will take about 2-3 years. Automatic intelligent health monitoring of domestic geometric technologyThe commercialization of toilets is accelerating. Its founder, Chen Liangcheng, said the toilet will be officially commercialized in the second half of 2019.
In his eyes, online clinical care system is the greater value that toilets bring to human health—the patient’s recovery process can be effectively supervised, which in turn can advance medical technology. “The data collected is always user-only. Unless he is willing to contribute his own data for others to use.” Chen Liangcheng stressed.
Davide Coppola, project director of the European Space Agency, believes that smart toilets have a bigger vision. “If a region has 1,000 smart toilets that collect human data, then you can use spatial data to monitor disease in a certain area and calculate the likelihood of disease transmission.” By comparing sensor data and satellite observations in the bathroom The combination of data ultimately led to the establishment of a preventive health information system.
Not long ago, the writer Zhang Xiaotong spit on the Weibo “the toilet was blocked.” In the future, smart toilets may make such a dilemma less. The toilet may no longer be synonymous with dirty, but more with adjectives like health and intelligence.