Imagine knowing your personalized health needs simply by going about your daily life. Imagine a world where important health information is leveraged, instead of flushed down the toilet.
The Duke Smart Toilet Lab is dedicated to the opportunities that human excreta offer to empower people to manage their own wellness. Urine and feces are data-rich and readily available specimens that are underutilized in part because of our aversion to collecting them. We believe that these barriers can be overcome by using the toilet itself as an alternative specimen collection device. We develop enabling technologies for capturing, sampling and analyzing excreta for critical health data, thereby unlocking the potential for improving individual health.
Current research focuses on the following key areas:
- The sampling toilet – designing a hands-free, flush-and-forget technology that collects and packages human excreta for individual analysis.
- Enabling technologies for automated tracking of bowel movement characteristics.
These efforts combine our team’s expertise and engineering experience in onsite waste treatment technologies, global sanitation and sensors, as well as capabilities at the forefront of biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics across Duke University.
In 2021, team members Sonia Grego, Brian Stoner and Geoff Ginsburg launched Coprata Inc. to commercialize the Smart Sampling Toilet technology.