Israeli digital health start-up OutSense has been granted patents for its IoT technology that analyses human waste to gain medical insights.

The company has filed three patent families involving elements of its medical toilet sensor.

The first patent is for detecting hidden blood in the toilet bowl. The device uses reflected light from the toilet bowl to determine the optical signature of hidden blood in the stool. A patent for this element of the technology has been granted in the USA, Europe, Japan and China.

A second patent has been secured in Europe and is pending in other countries for the company’s technique that can effectively analyse numerous constituents of stool and for spatial distribution of blood traces. On the basis of this analysis, the technique can identify blood origin along the gastro-intestinal tract.

A third patent is pending for the company’s technique to detect constituents of urine and dehydration from analysis of urine and stool.

“The patent approvals underscore the company’s strong intellectual property position and its clear lead over competitors in the field of stool and urine monitoring,” said Yfat Scialom, CEO of OutSense. “With the explosive growth in digital medicine, this kind of monitoring is going to become the norm.”

Hidden blood is crucial to the detection of colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and urinary infections. The company’s technology includes multi-spectral optical sensors, a light source and an autonomous inspection device that includes a wifi connection. The device scans the human waste, identifies the optical footprint of the faeces and urine components, sends the data for AI cloud-based analysis, and then supplies indications of various diseases at a high proven level of precision.

An additional tool developed by the company goes one step further by diagnosing abnormalities within the human waste. The information from the sampled blood, combined with additional analysis of the time from the bleeding to the excretion, provide details of the pathology of the bleeding. A certain pattern can determine whether the bleeding is from fissures or haemorrhoids or from polyps or tumours, or possibly from ulcers.

CommuniCare, a healthcare enterprise with more than 90 facilities in the USA, will begin piloting the technology later this year. In addition to this pilot, OutSense is also conducting clinical trials in Israel as well as a pilot in Japan. CommuniCare’s subsidiary, Longevity Venture Partners, is investing in OutSense.