IIIT-Delhi develops apparatus that can predict bowel movements

A team of Delhi's Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology has developed an apparatus that can predict bowel movements to help people with lower body paralysis make arrangements in advance.

The apparatus consisting of a stethoscope and a microphone has to be wrapped around the abdomen. The stethoscope will listen to the intestinal sounds while the microphone will amplify it and send it to a smartphone, which will record these sounds.

"Using a pre-trained machine learning classifier, the sounds will be classified as either a bowel sound or a non-bowel sound in the smartphone. In case if the sound is a bowel sound, the person will be notified that s/he is about to experience a bowel movement," assistant professor at the institute's Computer Science department and team member Juhi Ranjan said.

"Due to the muscle function loss, people with lower body paralysis find it difficult to sense their bowel timings which may sometime result in bowel accidents making it a situation of embarrassment for them. To avoid such awkward situations, they tend to follow a very restricted lifestyle which includes strictly monitoring the food they should eat, the timings of food intake, using an enema, etc."