A toilet seat being tested by UMass Chan Medical School could help address chronic diseases. Here’s how.

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The “seat of the heart” is still in the research phase.

A toilet seat can be the answer to managing chronic diseases. Who knew?

Researchers at UMass Chan Medical School’s Program in Digital Medicine are testing how digital sensors in a smart toilet seat can be used to collect physiological data to monitor diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure.

the “Heart seat“, made of Houseis still in the research phase. Toilet seats were chosen because they are a “part of everyone’s habit,” said principal investigator and co-director of the digital medicine program Apurv Soni.

“The idea is to try to understand how we can get data from patients’ homes in between when they come in to be seen at the hospital, to observe signals and identify signals that can give us an early warning of someone getting sick,” Soni told Boston.com.

The study, called COMMODE-seat, which stands for “correlate results with mobile monitoring using digital sensors in a seat,” aims to take signals from a sensor-embedded toilet seat that measures heart rate, oxygen saturation and other biometric measurements, including blood pressure.

Each patient participating in the study will be able to participate for up to a year, filling out surveys and using an app to track their symptoms and any medications.

Soni said the idea of ​​remote patient monitoring “has a lot of momentum” and is becoming “quite mainstream.”

The goal of the project, Soni says, is to use data from users’ daily lives to passively collect data that can be used to provide care.

“We’re very much in the exploratory stage to see if any of the data we collect from this formula might be useful to inform care in the future,” he said.

Casana’s co-founder and chief research officer, Dave Borkholder, PhD, said in a statement that the company “couldn’t ask for a better partner” in its research.

“Each finding brings us one step closer to enabling doctors to provide better care,” Borkholder said.