CNET (among others) has brought us news at the confluence of two contemporary concerns: Are we carrying germs we don’t know about? and … Just how private is *anything* we do anymore? Yes, it’s a toilet that can tell who you are by scanning your nether regions, and then analyze your, er, product for medical information:
Researchers have created a smart toilet that can analyze feces and urine for various diseases and some forms of cancer. The experimental toilet can also identify users by both their unique fingerprints, and even their anal prints. Yes, those exist.
The researchers from Stanford University published their findings in a new study in Nature Biomedical Engineering science journal on Monday. Twenty-one participants tested the smart toilet over the course of several months.
“The smart toilet is the perfect way to harness a source of data that’s typically ignored, and the user doesn’t have to do anything differently,” lead study researcher Sanjiv Gambhir said in a statement.
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One of the more unusual features of this smart toilet is a built-in identification system that reads the user’s fingerprints on the toilet flush handle, and even weirder… an anus-recognition system.
“The whole point is to provide precise, individualized health feedback, so we needed to make sure the toilet could discern between users,” Gambhir said. “We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique.”
The anal and fingerprint scans enable users to be matched to their specific data, which comes in handy if more than one person is using the same smart toilet. While the toilet does take scans of the anal print, it does not share those images to the user’s cloud or doctors.
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Or so they say.
There are diagrams at the link.