Toto's new smart toilet will examine your stool to determine if you’re healthy or not.
The concept product, dubbed the Wellness Toilet, could hit the consumer market in the next few years. “Toto’s new toilet scans your body and key outputs, providing wellness recommendations as a result of the simple routine act of sitting down on the toilet,” the company says.
The approach is certainly unconventional. But it does have a key advantage over other health and fitness tech: You don’t have to wear anything or change your daily routine in any way. Instead, all the health tracking occurs whenever you take a regular bathroom break.
“Toilets and people have two unique touchpoints that cannot be found elsewhere—the skin and human waste,” the company says. “The Wellness Toilet is in direct contact with individuals’ skin when they are sitting on it, and it analyzes the waste they deposit—a wealth of wellness data can be collected from fecal matter.”
Toto isn’t the first to come up with the idea. Last year, scientists at Stanford University published a paper on a disease-detecting smart toilet that also examined fecal matter and urine to determine the user’s health. (In addition, the same toilet had butthole recognition to help it differentiate between users.)
Toto didn’t go into details on the technology that'll power the toilet. But presumably the seat will be outfitted with an array of sensors, which can then send the data back to the company’s data centers for analysis. The company says it’ll then supply health recommendations to the user via a mobile app, including changes they can make to their diet.