There isn’t much about my bathroom business that I want others to know about. But I’d conquer my squeamishness if it meant catching a disease early and putting a stop to it.

That’s the premise of the smart toilet, which is fitted with technology to interpret the data that’s dripped, dumped or otherwise flushed to glean insights into health. Urine flow a bit light? That might indicate a problem with the prostate. Blood in the urine? That suggests a urinary tract or kidney infection. Different shapes and textures of waste can point to gastrointestinal problems. The smart toilet can even detect specific molecular signals that flag certain types of cancer or infectious diseases, such as COVID-19.

There’s a lot of potential in the idea, even though its data source is something we think so little of. “Toileting habits are especially sensitive to talk about,” said Seung-min Park, PhD, an instructor of urology at Stanford Medicine, who worked with the late Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, to develop the smart toilet project. Park now collaborates with professor of urology Joseph Liao, MD, and Nicole Martinez-Martin, JD, an ethicist and assistant professor of pediatrics. “There are big psychological barriers to advancing smart toilets. People think it’s too dirty, or they feel uncomfortable about it — it’s not socially acceptable to discuss, especially at work.”

The idea of a smart toilet isn’t new. Science fiction novels, such as Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, have made reference to them since the 1980s. As data interpretation and biomarker monitoring technology — two factors the smart toilet’s success depends on — advance, its promise gro