When You’ve Seen One…..
The latest TV ad to spook seniors and feed the neurotics is for a unit you can place two fingers on to produce “a medical grade EKG (!)” that the would-be sufferer can immediately transmit to his nurse practitioner’s office in order to be advised to go to the ER. A nation that furnishes consumers of wearable tech to monitor continuous vitals is so bought into fearful navel-gazing that it’s hard to see an end…
And as now proven on a daily basis, the combination of big government and health care almost always makes everything worse. Introducing courtesy of Sen. Rand Paul’s annual Festivus Report on government waste, a new “smart toilet,” made possible by a $6.9 million grant to Stanford University from the NIH (the same boondoggle factory that allowed us to be Fauci’d without the lube for at least the past year). Of what possible business could developing a “smart toilet” be of the federal…aw never mind, the great majority of you reading this have already bought into Uncle Sugar getting into every crevice of health care anyway, as though the very act of expenditure was itself sufficiently compassionate.
So tell ‘em what they won, Johnny!!
“Technologies for the longitudinal monitoring of a person’s health are poorly integrated with clinical workflows, and have rarely produced actionable biometric data for healthcare providers. Here, we describe easily deployable hardware and software for the long-term analysis of a user’s excreta through data collection and models of human health. The ‘smart’ toilet, which is self-contained and operates autonomously by leveraging pressure and motion sensors, analyses the user’s urine using a standard-of-care colorimetric assay that traces red–green–blue values from images of urinalysis strips, calculates the flow rate and volume of urine using computer vision as a uroflowmeter, and classifies stool according to the Bristol stool form scale using deep learning, with performance that is comparable to the performance of trained medical personnel. Each user of the toilet is identified through their fingerprint and the distinctive features of their anoderm, and the data are securely stored and analyzed (snicker) in an encrypted cloud server. The toilet may find uses in the screening, diagnosis and longitudinal monitoring of specific patient populations.”
How hilarious is it to be a Stanford researcher, doubtless high on edibles before lunch, determining that we don’t have enough longitudinal health monitoring, and writing a grant application to make up the defecatory deficit? How far-fetched is it, really, to think that the AAFP would jump on this, developing new CME’s and exhorting shiny new FP residents to have their smart phones at the ready while eating in a masked outdoor setting, breathlessly waiting for the latest revelation from an anxious sitter?
“The toilet operates with artificial intelligence, includes three cameras (including one video camera) ” apparently to get some high-def of those distinctive anoderm features that anyone toting an EKG in their pocket or constantly checking their heart rate via their Apple watch would be only too eager to share with the world. “For it to work, the ‘user would sit on the toilet, and the hardware’s three cameras would use ‘biometric identifiers to securely associate the collected data with the user’s identity,’ such as ‘fingerprinting and a distinctive method of using anal creases … referred to here as analprint,’ states the report.”
I’d like to hope that this would spell the end for Instagram and TikTok, but it will likely be just the opposite.
Rest assured, the way things are going, the government will be in your toilet specifically and the toilet generally.
Brilliant, Dr. Conrad
…analprint!?!? The jokes almost write themselves.