Image credit- hopkinsmedicine.org
A team of researchers at the Delhi’s Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) has developed an apparatus that can predict bowel movements to help people with lower body paralysis make arrangements in advance.
The apparatus consisting of a stethoscope and a microphone has to be wrapped around the abdomen. The stethoscope will listen to the intestinal sounds while the microphone will amplify it and send it to a smartphone, which will record these sounds.
Using a pre-trained machine learning classifier, the sounds will be classified as either a bowel sound or a non-bowel sound in the smartphone. In case if the sound is a bowel sound, the person will be notified that she/he is about to experience a bowel movement.
The project is right now in testing phase and the team aims to test it on at least 100 users before it is made available for commercial use.
