Biohacking In the Bathroom: The Internet of Toilet
Daniel Maggs
Every day we flush terabytes of data on our health down the toilet. Daniel runs Bisu, a startup developing a next-generation urine analyzer that lets people capture these data and get personalized advice to optimize their health and fitness. Daniel will explain how urine biomarkers can be used to create actionable feedback loops, how you can access these data for yourself, and when toilets will change from waste collection to data collection devices.
There is so much from our bodies being literally flushed down the toilet every single day. My job is to help you get hold of this data to improve your life. This is the missing piece of your biohacking toolkit.
Summary
- Urine analysis provides critical data on electrolytes, pH, and hormonal health that is often discarded, serving as a vital "missing piece" in personal health monitoring and biohacking.
- The Sabisu device utilizes a microfluidic chip and a mess-free "pop and extend" stick to collect and analyze samples without the need for traditional collection cups or manual reference charts.
- Results are delivered to a smartphone in two minutes, offering personalized dietary recommendations and insights based on specific trends in sodium, potassium, and magnesium levels.
- The roadmap for this technology includes expanding from portable dietary tests to diverse applications such as pet health, saliva testing, smart diapers, and integrated toilet seat sensors.
- Patented light absorbance and transmittance technology ensures high accuracy and quantitative data, distinguishing the system from traditional qualitative test strips that rely on color matching.
Article
Biohacking In The Bathroom: Smart Urine Analysis And The Internet Of Toilet
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Daniel Maggs Made A Case For The Data We Flush Away
The future of personal health, Daniel Maggs suggested, might begin not in the wrist-worn tracker or the blood testing clinic, but in the bathroom.
Speaking at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** on **1 November 2019**, Maggs presented **“Biohacking In the Bathroom: The Internet of Toilet”**, a talk that turned one of modern life’s least glamorous routines into a serious frontier of consumer health technology. His argument was disarmingly simple. Every day, people discard a stream of biological information that could reveal meaningful clues about diet, hydration, electrolyte balance, and hormonal health.
“Most people have small daily habits to take care of their health, but we want to go deeper inside the body to understand what is really happening,” Maggs said.
It was a pitch for a new category of biohacking, one less obsessed with spectacle than with frictionless, intimate measurement. If wearables gave people a view of the body from the outside, Maggs argued, urine analysis could offer a missing internal layer.
The Missing Piece In Personal Health Monitoring
For years, the quantified-self movement taught people to count steps, monitor sleep, and measure heart rate variability. But Maggs, speaking on behalf of Sabisu, pushed the audience toward a more neglected truth: some of the most useful day-to-day health data was being quite literally flushed away.
Urine, he argued, held actionable information that blood did not always provide as clearly, especially when the goal was not diagnosis of disease but adjustment of everyday behavior. In particular, he pointed to **electrolytes** and **pH**, areas where blood values are often tightly controlled by the body and therefore less revealing of nutritional patterns.
This was not, he stressed, a contest between blood and urine. It was a matter of using the right tool for the right question. Glucose and ketones may still belong to blood as the gold standard, but dietary pH and electrolyte trends could be more usefully tracked in urine. For biohackers chasing better recovery, smarter supplementation, or more precise nutritional feedback, that distinction mattered.
Reinventing The Humble Urine Test
If traditional urine testing had failed to become a habit, Maggs implied, it was not because the data lacked value. It was because the experience was dreadful.
The old model remained stubbornly primitive: urinate into a cup, dip a strip, compare colours against a chart, and hope for the best. It was messy, awkward, and poorly suited to repetition. In a health culture increasingly shaped by seamless apps and elegant devices, the urine strip looked like a relic.
Sabisu’s answer was a system built around a **microfluidic chip** and a patented sample collection stick designed to avoid the indignity of cups and splashing. The user, Maggs explained, would “pop and extend” the stick, collect the sample via an absorbent pad, and let the device draw the fluid into the chip. The test would then be read by a separate reader, with results delivered to a smartphone in around two minutes.
“We want to change the experience to something you have never seen before: urine testing that is simple, natural, and clean,” he said.
The ambition was not merely to modernise a test. It was to make biological monitoring habitual.
From Raw Numbers To Behaviour Change
The stronger part of Maggs’s presentation was not the hardware but the philosophy behind it. Too much health technology, he suggested, still burdened users with data they could not interpret. Sabisu’s promise was to turn readings into advice.
“We provide you the results to show where you are and what needs changing,” he said. “There is a logic behind it; it is not just a number.”
That logic mattered. A magnesium reading, for instance, might mean different things depending on surrounding context. A high level could reflect dietary intake, or simply fluid consumption. To be useful, health data needed interpretation, trend analysis, and practical recommendation. Maggs described a system that would translate measurements of **sodium**, **potassium**, **magnesium**, and **pH** into personalised food guidance, reasons behind those suggestions, and trend tracking over time.
This, he insisted, was where the company hoped to distinguish itself from conventional diagnostics. “Our approach is not just about diagnostics or checking for problems; it is about driving real behavior change to improve your health.”
In a wellness market flooded with abstractions, it was a refreshingly concrete claim. The point was not just to know more. The point was to eat differently, hydrate better, supplement more intelligently, and build a feedback loop between biology and daily choices.
Why Accuracy Became The Crucial Battleground
In the question-and-answer session, Maggs was pressed on the most obvious concern facing any startup entering the consumer diagnostics space: accuracy.
His answer drew a line between older urine strip systems and Sabisu’s technical approach. Standard strips, he explained, rely on **reflectance**, a rough method in which light bounces off the surface and estimates concentration through colour. Sabisu instead used **absorbance and transmittance**, passing light through the sensor and measuring what was absorbed and transmitted.
The distinction may have sounded arcane to a lay audience, but its significance was clear. Maggs wanted to move urine testing from the realm of crude, qualitative approximations toward something more controlled and quantitative. In a market where many rivals were, in his telling, simply digitising the old strip-and-phone-camera model, Sabisu sought to build a defensible technical edge.
He also argued that the company’s intellectual property stretched beyond chemistry to include sample collection, measurement mechanisms, manufacturing methods, and future devices. But even then, he suggested that the real challenge was cultural, not legal.
“The challenge for us is really raising awareness that this is urine testing, but not as you knew it before,” Maggs said.
The Long Road To The Smart Toilet
The phrase “internet of toilet” risked sounding like a punchline. Maggs treated it as a roadmap.
He noted that the dream of the smart toilet had circulated for decades, with earlier attempts, including by Japanese companies, failing to achieve liftoff. In his assessment, the technology had simply not been ready. Some systems had chased unreliable biomarkers such as urine glucose. Others had arrived before sensors, connectivity, and consumer expectations had matured.
Now, he suggested, conditions were changing. The near-term future would begin with portable dietary and wellness tests. But the horizon was broader: **pet urine testing**, **saliva sensors for oral health**, **smart diapers**, and eventually **integrated toilet seat sensors** capable of capturing health information passively at home.
There was something quietly radical in this vision. Maggs was not describing a medical device used in moments of concern. He was describing an ambient health infrastructure, embedded in ordinary domestic life, collecting signals where people were least likely to resist them.
The bathroom, in this account, became a frontier of preventive care.
A Wellness Device That Wanted To Feel Natural
Perhaps the most striking thing about the presentation was its understanding that successful health technology depends as much on psychology as on engineering.
People do not adopt tools simply because they are accurate. They adopt tools that fit into life with minimal friction, embarrassment, or effort. Maggs seemed to grasp that for urine analysis to matter, it had to shed the clinical awkwardness that kept it on the margins of consumer behavior.
What Sabisu was selling, then, was not just a sensor. It was a new ritual, one meant to feel clean, quick, and almost inevitable. The smartphone result in two minutes was part of that. So was the effort to convert chemistry into understandable next steps. So was the broader narrative that biohacking could expand beyond the gym, the kitchen, or the laboratory bench and into the most private room in the house.
At **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki**, Daniel Maggs framed urine not as waste, but as signal. In doing so, he offered a glimpse of a health culture moving beyond visible metrics and toward subtler forms of self-knowledge.
Whether the smart toilet would finally arrive remained, at that point, an open question. But Maggs’s presentation made one thing hard to ignore: the bathroom had begun to look less like the end of a biological process and more like the beginning of a new kind of data economy.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki