Smart toilet can detect congestive heart failure

Hospitals will soon be able to monitor patients with congestive heart failure in the comfort of their own homes, thanks to a new type of toilet-seats that can measure biometrics during "natural" processes.

The toilet seats are equipped to measure the electrical and mechanical activity of the heart, and can monitor heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, and the patient's weight and stroke volume, which is the amount of blood pumped out of the heart at every beat.

Created by a team of researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, the toilet seats will be brought through the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance process by the researchers' company Heart Health Intelligence, the institute said in a statement on Wednesday.

The toilet seats would be purchased by hospitals and issued to heart failure patients after discharge, it added.

Algorithms in the seats will analyse the data, and with further development warn of deteriorating condition.

The system will pick up deteriorating conditions before the patients even realise they are symptomatic, said Nicholas Conn, a postdoctoral fellow at RIT and founder and CEO of Heart Health Intelligence.

--IANS

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