New Sensor Can Identify Bowel Diseases Including Cholera

A bacterial disease called cholera that causes diarrhea affects millions of people and kills about 150,000 people annually. The early notification of medical specialists and better resource and help allocation would result from identifying probable communicable disease transmission for such an outbreak. Monitoring this and other bowel diseases is a delicate subject, though, for obvious reasons. Maia Gatlin of the Georgia Institute of Technology will discuss how a noninvasive microphone sensor could identify bowel diseases without gathering any personally identifying information in her talk, ‘The feces thesis: Using machine learning to detect diarrhea’.

Using Machine Learning to Predict Occurrence of Bowel Diseases

The method was put to the test using audio data from online sources by Gatlin and her team. Each excretion event’s audio sample was converted into a spectrogram, which essentially turns sound into a visual. The audio and spectrogram display various features depending on the occurrences. For instance, while excrement may have a single tone, urinating typically has a continuous tone. Contrarily, diarrhea is more unpredictable.

A machine learning algorithm was fed spectrogram images and trained to classify every event according to its attributes. To ensure that the algorithm was picking up the correct sound features regardless of the environment surrounding the sensor, its performance was evaluated against data with and without background noises.

Sensor to Monitor Cholera Outbreak

“The hope is that this sensor, which is small in footprint and non-invasive in approach, could be deployed to areas where cholera outbreaks are a persistent risk,” said Gatlin. “The sensor could also be used in disaster zones (where water contamination leads to the spread of waterborne pathogens), or even in nursing/hospice care facilities to automatically monitor the bowel movements of patients. Perhaps someday, our algorithm can be used with existing in-home smart devices to monitor one’s bowel movements and health!”

Source-Medindia