High-tech toilet seat aims to help researchers in Rochester reduce heart disease

(WHAM) - Research in Rochester is flush with new ideas to help cut down on the number of people returning to hospitals for heart disease treatments.

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) are working together on an in-home monitoring to monitor vital signs for people with heart failure. One of those innovations: a high-tech toilet seat.

The Fully-Integrated Toilet Seat, or FIT Seat, will use artificial intelligence and other techniques to give updated data for doctors in a format that is easily readable. Sensors embedded on the surfaces of the FIT seat will detect heart rates, blood flow and oxygenation rates.

The team is being led by David Borkholder, the Bausch and Lomb Professor in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, and Dr. Wojciech Zareba at URMC. Borkholder said the tools they are developing will help alert medical teams earlier and save both time and money for everyone involved.

“The cost of readmission usually exceeds the cost of the original hospitalization when individuals have a diagnosis of heart failure,” said Borkholder.

"It is like having a patient on bedside monitoring in an intensive care unit," Dr. Zareba said. "At home, people don’t usually have these monitoring tools. This seat is serving as a good monitoring tool. Even if it is not continuous, it will be used by patients several times per day, and each time, it will record data and send it to be processed.”

The artificial intelligence technology can be trained to recognize patterns and characteristics that are distinct to each patient, so that if the seat is used by someone other than the patient, the data will not be mixed up by the physiican.

The joint venture is being funded through a $2.9 million grant through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

More than six million adults in the U.S. alone have heart disease, according to the American Heart Association.