Just as smartphones now monitor heart rate and other health measures, smart toilets will become commonplace, predicted a top researcher at the Future of Medicine summit in West Palm Beach, Florida.
“In my world, there would be a toilet sensor,” said Michael Snyder, director of the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. “You laugh, but I predict there will be one.”
Snyder imagines a future that, to a large degree, he is already living. He has become his own test subject for technologies whose costs are coming down dramatically, from reading his genetic code to sophisticated looks at the health clues in his skin, blood, stool and urine.
A deep dive inside his genetic map revealed a surprise, he said: markers that suggested a predisposition to type 2 diabetes. He was naturally thin, not heavy. Doctors told him he did not appear to be a strong candidate for the disease. But there came a day when testing showed blood-sugar levels that classified him as diabetic.
“I had the world’s worst diet,” he said. Cake, lemonade, soda: It all caught up to him. He cut out foods with added sugar and began to cycle and run much more vigorously. Within six months, his sugar levels returned to normal, he said.
Snyder spoke to about 500 health professionals and others attending the eighth annual Future of Medicine Summit on Oct. 9-10, sponsored by the Palm Beach C0unty Medical Society and partners at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach.
The cost of analyzing the genetic materials that tell our bodies what to do — known as sequencing the genome — has come down from many millions of dollars per test to about $1,400, Snyder said.
One day, it will cost about $100, and the results will be available during a single visit to a doctor’s office, he predicted.
He admits such information can be controversial, and might not be the right thing for everyone — particularly those whose anxiety about possible conditions could hurt their enjoyment of life.
“People say, ‘Mike, that’s great it worked out for you, but what you’re doing is really wrong,’ ” Snyder said. ” ‘You’re going to scare the bejeebers out of everybody. It’s going to break the health care system.’ "
But the possibility of low-cost, ongoing monitoring of everything from your genetic map to the bacteria living in your gut can shed new light on personal health in a way accessible to more and more people, he said.
The information could not only help people treat a current illness but also reveal for some who are healthy that they are more likely to get diseases such as certain kinds of cancer, letting them take action based on this knowledge.
“I’m not saying every person can handle this information,” Synder said. “If you’re a worrier, you probably shouldn’t.”
But ways for ordinary people to monitor their own health, he said, are going to be increasingly simple and affordable — maybe as easy as visiting the toilet.
Early trailblazers are already out there, such as a Japanese toilet that can monitor sugar levels in urine. More sophisticated stuff is in the pipeline. MIT's SENSEeable City Lab said this year it is"working towards the concept of the smart toilet."
As for getting to know your genes up close and personal, already “it’s not 'can you get your genome sequenced?' It’s whether you want to,” Snyder said.
“It’s a huge opportunity for families and patients to be able to guide some of their own care,” he said.
About the Author
