Bio
Consumer health monitoring devices are increasingly found in our phones, on our wrists, and in our bedrooms, but not in our bathrooms due to the taboo surrounding human excreta. I want to challenge this taboo by highlighting the valuable information found in urine and stool - ranging from the microbiome to cancer biomarkers. The “Precision Health Toilet” (PH Toilet) I developed aims to improve human health by passively monitoring human excreta for signs of disease. Passive health monitoring is the key to ‘precision health’, a proactive and personalized approach to healthcare that focuses on the prevention and early detection of disease, and the PH Toilet will integrate this into the background of daily routines. My prototype is a non-invasive, low-cost method that uses artificial intelligence (computer vision and deep learning) to analyze human excreta for personalized monitoring and shows immense promise to become an integral tool in the new era of precision health.
I am the inventor of the PH Toilet for proactive healthcare. The seminal work of this prototype development was published in Nature Biomedical Engineering last year and has garnered tremendous media attention. Despite the inundation of COVID-19 related research articles, this paper was ranked #7 by the Altmetric media attention score among all published articles in 2020. It demonstrates a functional, field-tested prototype of the PH Toilet, which includes urinalysis, uroflowmetry, defecation analysis and user identification with computer vision and deep learning. I am developing an upgraded version of the PH toilet that can screen various diseases (e.g., infectious disease [COVID-19], cancer) through biochemical analysis of human excreta.
