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AI’s Newest Use Case: Our Toilets?

November 17, 2018 Ian LeViness AI News Comments Off

The future effect that Artificial Intelligence systems will have in your home extends to more than just your technological devices and your everyday home appliances. They will also be able to connect quite directly with your bathroom, according to several sources.

Imagine an AI toilet.

What does that bring to mind for you? Do you conceptualize it as a robot that diagnoses you based on what it takes in?

If your answer is yes here, then you are not far off from what the media has recently been reporting on this subject. What if an AI scanned your waste to prevent diseases that might be close to affecting you in the future? Essentially, what popular media sources are saying is that since other AI research says that neural networks can take in certain medical data and predict the likeliness of certain diseases, then this ability can be extended to scanning human waste, to do so more accurately.

The problem is that none of this is being done right now. As with many headlines related to new technologies and what they are capable of doing, in the end, this amounts to a mere prediction.

In the very least, because no research seems to exist that shows toilets doing this in practice, we can conclude in this fashion. Despite the relative strangeness that this idea may evoke in some people, if this use case did currently exist, then we all might become much healthier over time. One way to more fully understand this possibility is to think about what these scans could do for the average person.

Imagine that your toilet analyzed the substances in your waste, extended that to your diet and recommended what you should and should not eat to maximize your overall health. Now imagine the same thing in connection with identifying substances that typically indicate the coming onset of a disease, before that disease has to happen.

Healthcare would effectively be revolutionized, but again, only if this type of scanning works as it should. Before we get there, any companies looking to succeed in this field will have to find a relevant number of people to test this use case on.

In the end, that just might be the hardest hurdle for any interested firm to overcome. In a sense, they would need to ask themselves: how do we convince people that allowing an AI to act in this way in their lives is not a scary invasion of privacy?

A good place to start might be with a small group of early adopters who can share really, quantitatively measurable results that these AI systems are able to generate. Even so, what is possibly more important is whether any of these people would actually avoid any major health problems, due to this technology.