Researchers are developing “smart toilets” that can scan urine and feces samples for health data using cameras and machine learning, raising privacy concerns
Commodes that measure vital signs, screen for chronic illnesses and might even diagnose Covid-19 are in the works Tweets: @sub8u , @intellihubnews , and @martinsfp Tweets: Subrahmanyam Kvj / @sub8u : Got to admit. Commodes, cameras, and artificial intelligence all in the same sentence was not what I was expecting. For 2021, at least!😂 (Fascinating approach though for public health in future years!) https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/... Intellihub / @intellihubnews : “In the Covid-19 pandemic, more communities launched wastewater surveillance initiatives, enabling health officials to hunt for early signs of the virus in cities and neighborhoods and track its spread.” https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ Martin Sfp Bryant / @martinsfp : It was only a (fecal) matter of time... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Smart toilets extend a playbook already proven at the household scale: Kinsa built a business selling aggregated illness data from smart thermometers in over 500,000 US homes to buyers like Clorox, and later pitched the same network at COVID-19 tracking during its pandemic-era flu-prediction work. The toilet adds cameras and machine learning to the most sensitive sample there is, which is why the privacy reaction echoes earlier fights over who holds health data.
The arc runs through institutional data too: Google's push into health care stalled on getting systems like Ascension to share patient records amid patient concerns, cities are already putting AI into sewers for infrastructure inspection, and South Korea's [[a:973968|Busan smart-city project shows governments repurposing surveillance systems for pandemic response]]. A commode that screens for chronic illness — and possibly Covid-19 — sits exactly where those threads converge.
First-order effects
- The immediate friction is consent: households would host a device that photographs and analyzes bodily waste, putting the burden on researchers and manufacturers to prove the data can't be re-identified or repurposed — the same trust gap that slowed Google's Ascension health-data partnership.
Second-order effects
- If waste-scanning toilets reach homes, an 'illness data' resale market like Kinsa's — which sells signals to consumer companies such as Clorox — has an obvious extension, giving insurers, employers, and packaged-goods firms a new stream of individual-level health indicators.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across Kinsa, sewer-inspection AI, and Busan points toward bodily and environmental samples becoming routine public-health sensors, forcing regulators to decide whether waste-derived data counts as protected health information or open surveillance — a line no major jurisdiction has clearly drawn.
The trend: Everyday infrastructure — thermometers, sewers, now toilets — is being instrumented into a public-health sensing layer faster than privacy law can classify what it collects.