Researchers invent smart toilet seat that can effectively monitor heart health

Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have developed a smart toilet seat monitoring system designed to track the health of heart failure patients and reduce hospital readmissions. In a paper in the journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth, the researchers report that the new smart toilet seat is waterproof, battery-powered, and data-connected to the cloud. Three sensors are placed inside to measure electrocardiogram (ECG), photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistic cardiogram (BCG) with an accuracy comparable to hospital-grade monitoring equipment.

Currently, Nicholas Conn, a postdoctoral fellow at RIT and one of the study members, founded a company called Heart Health Intelligence to commercialize the technology. The goal is to provide an FDA-approved device. It will be sold to hospitals in the future for transfer to patients after discharge. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Heart failure, or HF for short, is a cardiovascular disease characterized by weakened myocardial function that affects about 6.5 million Americans each year, with more than 960,000 new cases.

Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle weakens and cannot maintain enough blood flow to meet the body’s needs. Continuous monitoring of blood pressure is critical throughout the management and treatment of heart failure, as optimal blood pressure control is the primary goal of heart failure. Heart failure costs an estimated $30.7 billion annually in the U.S., according to the paper, and is expected to increase by 127% to $69.7 billion by 2030, with hospitalization accounting for about 80% of the total cost of heart failure. Therefore, reducing hospitalization rates is an effective way to reduce the cost of heart failure.

Due to the sudden and transient characteristics of heart disease, many heart disease patients are not in the hospital when they have the disease, the hospital cannot record the ECG at that time, and the patients are often in a normal state when they are in the hospital, so that they cannot be detected. cause of disease. Lei Feng.com learned that some experts have done experiments. When simulating defecation, when the intra-abdominal pressure of the human body increases, the blood pressure will also increase, and the heart rate will also increase accordingly. Middle-aged and elderly people or people with various diseases often have constipation, and their blood pressure rises even higher when they defecate. All of this increases the burden on the heart and can lead to myocardial infarction.

Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have designed a smart toilet seat in order to facilitate heart failure patients to monitor their conditions more comfortably at home and reduce the rate of re-hospitalization. The smart toilet seat, developed by Nicholas Conn and RIT engineer David Borkholder, runs on battery power, transmits health data wirelessly directly to the cloud, and can be cleaned daily with household cleaners. The monitoring system automatically captures cardiovascular data without interruption whenever the user is sitting on the toilet.

Since heart failure is characterized by poor cardiac performance, cardiac output (CO) is an important component of heart failure diagnosis and treatment. CO is defined as the product of stroke volume (SV) and heart rate (HR) and is typically measured using echocardiography, cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or catheterization. In acute heart failure, the myocardium is unable to maintain adequate CO, leading to chronic heart failure and even death if left untreated.

Currently, there are no home solutions for remote and accurate monitoring of CO and SV. Patients with hypoxemia (oxygen saturation

The chair can be used to measure the electrocardiogram (ECG) of the heart, ballistic cardiogram (BCG) to measure mechanical forces associated with the cardiac cycle, and photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure the cardiac cycle. The researchers performed 8-week hospital-grade monitoring of vital signs in 18 subjects and compared toilet seat-based blood pressure and peripheral blood oxygenation estimates.

During the test, subjects were unable to speak, urinate or defecate and were asked to sit at home as usual. Because urination and defecation can change stroke volume (SV) and heart rate (HR). In the future, Conn said, the company plans to incorporate data on the fraction of pee moments that are excluded into the algorithm. Test results show that the toilet seat-based cardiovascular monitoring system has successfully demonstrated blood pressure, stroke volume and oxygen saturation in line with hospital gold standard measurements. The system can capture home heart data that was previously unattainable.

By using this toilet seat regularly, patients can know if their heart condition is getting worse and need to see a doctor. However, it still needs to be verified by clinical trials. A hospital admitting 150 discharged patients can lose as much as $500,000 a year, while Heart Health Intelligence’s 150 smart toilet seats cost only about $200,000. The smart toilet lid developed by the Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States is not the first example of a “toilet” to detect health conditions. Google, the University of Cambridge in the UK, and Panasonic in Japan have all developed smart toilets.

A Google patent describes the smart bathroom of the future. The bathroom is equipped with multiple non-invasive health monitoring instruments, including an ultrasonic bathtub and a pressure-sensing toilet, which can comprehensively monitor the user’s cardiovascular health. Among them, the pressure-sensitive toilet seat can not only measure blood pressure, but also analyze the excretion of the human body. According to the patent, the technology can detect “the functional status and trends of the human physiological system,” so it can alert people to disease before it develops.

In 2018, scientists at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom designed a smart toilet that can detect the health of users, and analyze the health status of the human body through a “urine test”. According to Lei Feng.com, an optical sensor built into the smart toilet traps biomarkers in urine between gold nanoparticles and makes them glow different colors, enabling them to measure their concentration levels. Markers can reveal a lot about a person’s body. The smart toilet can also send monitoring reports to the phone and even alert the user’s personal doctor.

In addition to measuring data such as body fat rate, body water content, and muscle level, Panasonic’s smart toilet can also perform urine testing. The user only needs to place the urine sample in the urine detector when going to the toilet, it can automatically analyze the urine composition, and read 7 routine data such as urine PH value, occult blood, creatinine, etc., for self-testing of health. Provide the corresponding basis. However, most current health-related toilet technology focuses on analyzing urine and feces in the toilet bowl, rather than using sensors in the seat to track vital signs to detect physical ailments.

The Links:   FP10R12W1T4   LMG6911RPBC