{"id":180580,"date":"2023-01-08T10:31:15","date_gmt":"2023-01-08T10:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/there-was-a-lot-of-pee-on-the-ces-2023-show-floor\/"},"modified":"2023-01-08T10:31:15","modified_gmt":"2023-01-08T10:31:15","slug":"there-was-a-lot-of-pee-on-the-ces-2023-show-floor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/there-was-a-lot-of-pee-on-the-ces-2023-show-floor\/","title":{"rendered":"There was a lot of pee on the CES 2023 show floor"},"content":{"rendered":"
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, and I’m not sure if you can count four<\/em> instances of a product as a trend, but it’s certainly an interesting thread at this year’s CES. At this year’s show, a quartet of companies are showing off urine analysis tools designed to be used at home by the general public. These are positioned as a natural evolution of the fitness tracker, a device you can use to keep an even closer eye on your health and fitness. Most of them are built for your toilet, testing your pee for any number of easy-to-identify maladies. But is this the next great frontier of consumer health tracking? That rather depends on the public’s desire to delve deep into their own bladders.<\/p>\n My cynical take: I suspect the reason we’re seeing these pop up is because the wearables world is now played out. Back in 2019, I wrote that we’d reached the point where there were no new features that could be fitted to a smartwatch, fitness tracker or ring. Or, at least, none that were as valid, effective or accurate as what you now expect every device on the market to offer. Once it was possible to put a single lead ECG in a watch, there were no new health-tracking worlds left to conquer that didn’t involve breaking the skin.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dr. Audrey Bowden is Dorothy J. Wingfield Philips Chancellor Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, and head of the Bowden Biomedical Optics Laboratory. Dr. Bowden tells Engadget that clinical urinalysis is used as a \u201cfirst line screening for many diseases and conditions such as diabetes and kidney disease,\u201d but added that it can \u201calso play a role in ordinary, routine checkups, such as during pregnancy.\u201d<\/p>\n You may have seen your physician ask you for a urine sample and then stir a dipstick dotted with colored squares of reaction paper into the liquid you’ve just produced. In addition to visually checking urine for cloudiness (an obvious sign of a problem), these squares can run a wide variety of tests as part of this first-line screening process.<\/p>\n Each square corresponds to a different test, looking for factors like pH as well as the presence of blood, or white blood cells. Blood, for instance, can indicate kidney stones or cancer, while white blood cells are a clue your body is fighting an infection. If there’s excess glucose in the urine, it’s likely that diabetes is the culprit. Ketones would indicate ketosis, nitrites could indicate bacteria in the urinary tract, and so on.<\/p>\n Dr. Bowden added that for many conditions, urinalysis is not a \u201cdefinitive diagnostic, but rather serves as an initial prompt to perform a more complete investigation.\u201d And that since the clinical procedure has been to test for urine when there’s already evidence of a problem, it’s not clear how effective daily testing can really be.<\/p>\n A medical professional I interviewed, who requested anonymity for fear of compromising their professional standing, expressed skepticism both about the accuracy of these tests as well as their utility. They said that if people were running tests at home on a regular basis, it runs the risk of providing hypochondriacs with another reason to clog up care centers.<\/p>\n Dr. Shubha K. De (MD) is a Urologic surgeon who is presently working on a PhD in biomedical engineering. He raised a concern that, in primary care facilities, medical staff know how to validate the data they’re presented with, and to screen out false positives. This may not be the case in an at-home setting, and added that the accuracy of some tests vary wildly \u2014 a dipstick test to identify a bladder infection is roughly 80-percent accurate, but to diagnose bladder cancer, it falls to just 3 percent.<\/p>\n The most talked-about gadget at CES is surely Withings’ U-Scan, which even Jimmy Kimmel joked about in his opening monologue on Thursday. Given that Withings is already such a big name in the health-tracking world, it’s little surprise that it’s hogged the attention. The company showed off a device that sits on the dry part of your toilet bowl, and samples some of your trickle as you pee. Once that fluid is captured inside the device, it runs a sample through a microfluidic cartridge (with reaction paper) and uses a reader to look at the result. Once completed, the results are sent to your phone, with suggestions on what you might do to improve your health.<\/p>\n When it’s eventually released, U-Scan will offer a cartridge for menstrual cycle tracking, as well as one to monitor your hydration and nutrition levels. It’s this latter cartridge I tried during my time in Vegas this week, and it looked at the pH of my urine as well as the specific gravity (relative density) of my pee. But the company promises that it will eventually be able to identify nutrient levels, fat metabolism, ketones and quantities of vitamin C.<\/p>\n Both of these have raised red flags with professionals who are concerned that these analyzes don’t suit a one-size-fits-all model. Dr. Bowden said that menstrual cycle tracking based on \u201c’normalization’ curves may have been developed with too narrow a demographic to capture all interested users.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Bowden was also resistant to the idea that nutritional information can be extracted given clinical urinalysis doesn’t offer data about those markers. She said urine samples don’t really \u201cprovide reliable information over a given time window,\u201d and added that a \u201cdaily analysis of food nutritional content may be a stretch.\u201d Although she did say that it may be possible to detect \u201caccumulated nutritional deficits.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. De, however, says that it may be possible to extrapolate nutritional information back to a person’s diet using urine analysis. They said that physicians currently ask patients to run 24-hour urine collections, and that fluid is then examined for specific substances \u2014 like uric acid \u2014 to make inferences on dietary intake. \u201cThis is not always perfect, and currently needs some correlation with one’s diet history,\u201d but added that it’s plausible to imagine that, with a \u201cuser friendly app and some AI\u201d that it could work well.<\/p>\n Withings is looking to develop more clinical tests, and has said that it’s already working on a way to screen for bladder cancer markers. It’s here that my source who asked not to be named feels would offer real value to groups who are at risk of the disease. They said that a targeted monitoring program may help identify instances of the cancer early, which should dramatically increase survival rates.<\/p>\n