Diarrhea detector tracks cholera by ‘hearing’ people’s poop

Last Monday (5), researcher Maia Gatlin of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States made a presentation. detector diarrhea to be able to follow cholera by capturing the sound of people pooping🇧🇷 The innovation was presented at the last meeting of the international scientific community, the Acoustic Society of America.

Gatlin’s goal is to provide a compact and non-invasive sensor for detecting the number of people showing cholera symptoms in certain areas where there is a real risk of transmission. She says the sound samples are analyzed by a machine-learning-based algorithm that learns to distinguish sounds and monitor diseases.

Maia explains that the sound samples were converted into spectrograms, a source that converts sound into images so the team could understand the different sounds we produce in the bathroom. For example, the sound of urination is different from the sound of defecation, whereas diarrhea may produce more random sounds.

diarrhea detector

During the presentation, “Stool thesis: using machine learning to detect diarrhea,” the researcher explained that a non-invasive microphone is responsible for identifying intestinal diseases – it doesn’t collect personal information and doesn’t use a camera, it just diagnoses the problem.

“The sensor can be used to automatically monitor patients’ bowel movements in disaster areas (where water pollution leads to the spread of waterborne pathogens) or even in nursing/hospital care facilities,” said Gatlin.