AI listens to toilet sounds to guess whether people have diarrhoea

An artificial intelligence can detect diarrhoea with up to 98 per cent accuracy by analysing the sounds emanating from toilets. This skill could help us track outbreaks of diseases such as cholera. Maia Gatlin at the Georgia Institute of Technology and her colleagues collected 350 recordings of toilet-based sounds from YouTube and sound database Soundsnap – covering standard defecation, diarrhoea, urination and flatulence. The researchers then used 70 per cent of the recordings to train an AI to recognise audible differences between the four types of excretion. Once they confirmed that the AI could consistently do this with another 10 per cent of the data, they tested the AI's performance using the last 20 per cent of the recordings.