Smart toilets and Privacy concerns: Are your secrets safe?
Delhi : Smart toilets have the possibility to identify disease early, but squeamishness and privacy issues may prevent their widespread usage. The technology in the smart toilet may analyze data that is flushed, dripped, dumped, or otherwise disposed of to provide health-related information. Light urine flow? That might be a sign of a prostate issue. Urine with blood in it? That may indicate a kidney or urinary tract infection. Different feces textures and forms may indicate gastrointestinal issues. Even more, the smart toilet is capable of identifying particular molecular signals that indicate the presence of certain cancers or infectious disorders like COVID-19.
The concept has a lot of promise, despite the fact that we don't give its data source any thought. Seung-min Park, a professor of urology at Stanford Medicine and a collaborator on the smart toilet project with the late Sanjiv Sam Gambhir, asserts that "toileting habits are especially sensitive to talk about." Park is now working with Nicole Martinez-Martin, an ethicist and assistant professor of pediatrics, as well as Joseph Liao, a professor of urology.
Could a smart toilet be hacked to obtain sensitive health information by their app or using our medical wastage? If that were the case, they may discover personal information that most people would like to keep secret, such as if a smart toilet user was expecting, had cancer, or was taking a particular prescription. Technically speaking, practically all internet data transmissions are hackable. However, according to Park, the privacy and preservation requirements for data from a smart toilet would be the same as those that apply to medical office data collection for health purposes.
How? To understand this, we have to first understand how these devices function as Internet of Things (IoT) devices to monitor health. IoT refers to the idea of connecting gadgets to the Internet or one another. may be interconnected, including a phone, automobile, laptop, and others. Cybercriminals can simply hijack these gadgets.
Health is a delicate subject. Its linked data may be significant to a variety of persons. Your data may be stolen if a hacker targets the app linked to your smart toilet. Can. Even worse, it may be changed so that your doctor gets false information. It would be necessary to anonymize and safeguard any public data obtained by the smart toilet so that neither government-run nor non-governmental entities could access it. According to Park, a network of intelligent restrooms would be a great tool for tracking public health issues including newly erupting infectious disease epidemics.
