Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats -Company develops smart toilets to track health Toilets to retail for $10,000 - This Old Toilet 650-483-1139

ROVO, Utah - There's a digital health revolution underway, making it easier for all of us to track our wellness online and with our doctors.

We can monitor our heart rates, our calories and our exercise typically from apps on our phones. Now, a Provo-based company is developing smart toilets to track critical health measurements as part of our daily routine.

"It's been a big project. We've worked on it for 15 years," said David Hall, chairman of Medic.Life and Hall Laboratories in Provo. He said the project is a multi-million dollar project with more than 20 scientists on board. "It's a very exciting project. But it's also very complex."

If you could gauge your health with the flush of a toilet, would you want that kind of checkup? Hall believes that's one answer to better health. After all, everyone has to use the toilet several times a day, so he has developed artificially intelligent toilets that keep an eye on your health each time you visit the Medic.Life Lav.

"It's a regular toilet," he said, as he showed off a prototype toilet with dozens of wires and shiny chips attached to sensors. "But it just has a lot of sensors in it."

The AI toilet has sensors attached to the seat and into to the bowl. Those sensors passively monitor more than 20 key health indicators during every bathroom stop.

"These sensors put together could patch a story together," Hall said. That story should be a more complete tale of wellness than the person is getting today because it includes much more data than they'll ever compile from their trips to the doctor.

"We want individuals to know the key metrics in their health in an ongoing basis in trends, instead of events," Hall said.

The smart toilets they've developed so far will measure your weight when you step up, and when you leave. When you sit down, it takes your skin temperature, pulse rate and heart rate. The waste that you leave will be analyzed first by technology built right into the toilet. Then, it will also be analyzed in the cloud. You will be able to access all of that information on an app on your phone.

"We don't poke you. You don't have to come and see the doctor," Hall said. "You don't have to pee in a cup. You don't have to draw blood. Instead, the sensors do it as a part of your natural day to day activities."

With the Medic.Life Lav people can be proactive with trends in their health, he said, rather than reactive when they get sick. The toilet gives you multiple checkups each week in the privacy of your own home. It could be a tremendous asset for a diabetic tracking their glucose levels, or any of us trying to make sure that we are properly hydrated, or taking medicine as prescribed.

"Use that to change your lifestyle or improve your lifestyle," Hall said. "If you see some alarming things, send it on to your doctor."

They'll start clinical trials soon: testing the toilets in nursing homes and hospitals. The Lav is also a smart toilet that includes a bidet, heated seat, fume extractors, multimedia and is self-cleaning.

"Start using it to figure out its full value," he said.

The inventor said the Medic.Life Lav should be commercially available in two to three years. At about $10,000, the toilets won't be in every home at first. But Hall expects that hospitals and nursing homes may discover that the smart toilets replace expensive tests and eliminate other costs. Hall expects smart toilets with these capabilities to be the norm in 20 to 25 years.

https://www.ktvz.com/health/company-develops-smart-toilets-to-track-health/1087956789

by Jed Boal

Check out our new website
http://www.thisoldtoilet.com

source: 

Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats -These new toilets could solve a global problem - This Old Toilet 650-483-1139

More than half the world’s population lacks safe sanitation. Toilets that operate without running water might help.

A TOILET IS like a “super vaccine,” says Doulaye Kone of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “It kills disease where it is produced.” Traditional sanitation systems are costly to build and maintain, so the foundation’s Reinvented Toilet initiative is helping to develop alternatives such as the toilets seen here. Safe and inexpensive to operate, these commodes can function without running water and, in some cases, electricity. They’re also sustainable, eliminating pathogens while recovering nutrients and energy.

source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/07/new-toilets-could-solve-global-sanitation-problem/

by Manuel Canales

http://www.thisoldtoilet.com

Replacement Toilet Lids and Seats - A Toilet That Vaporizes Your Poo. Yes, Really! - This Old Toilet 650-483-1139

The Gates Foundation is working on new types of sanitation systems for parts of the world that can’t afford modern upgrades—including a toilet that zaps waste right at home.

There are 2.5 billion people around the world who don’t have access to safe, affordable sanitation systems. That means every time they go to the bathroom they have to put themselves in an unhealthy or dangerous situation.

It’s a problem that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation believes can be solved by innovative technologies. And through their Reinvent The Toilet Challenge, they’ve recruited scientists and engineers from around the world to make new types of toilets and public sanitation systems for places that can’t afford modern upgrades. One of the companies they’ve funded, New Zealand-based Scion Research (a government-owned company), is developing a new type of toilet that used pressure and microwave technology to treat sewage right in people’s homes.

“We get to flush here and it gets out of our household and treated and discharged into the environment and we’re removed from the issue so we don’t have to handle it personally or live amongst it. In a large part of the developing world that’s not the case. Their proximity to their waste is constant and the risk of disease is high,” says Daniel Gapes, an environmental engineer working on the project.

So why not just work on innovating infrastructure to help bring running water and sewage treatment facilities to places in the world that don’t have them? The Gates Foundation is working on innovating this as well, Gapes says, “but the fact is that in a lot of communities the infrastructure is so complex and the buildings and people are on top of one another and lack of access makes putting infrastructure in complex and unaffordable. Putting sewage into a city that doesn’t have it—the costs are mind-boggling,” he says.

So the Scion Research team turned to a technology that is fairly well known in large-scale applications (it’s used in mining and also sewage treatment), which they think could work well if innovative methods are used to downsize it. The method is called wet oxidation. Essentially, it works by taking waste and adding oxygen and then putting everything under pressure and gently heating it to about 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-toilet-that-vaporizes-your-poo

by Erin Biba
http://www.thisoldtoilet.com

source: