Everyone farts. But not everyone tracks their farts.
Now, smart underwear is making a case for paying closer attention to what comes out of your body. Its creators said they hope that tracking flatulence could eventually give researchers new insight into digestive health — and how a person's farts offer clues about what's happening in the gut.
Brantley Hall, the brains behind the smart underwear and an associate professor at the University of Maryland's department of cell biology and molecular genetics, said the team's "ultimate mission is to help people eat high-fiber diets comfortably with low intestinal gas."
In the United States, it is estimated that 95% of Americans don't eat enough fiber. The nutrient plays a critical role in digestive health, blood sugar and cholesterol regulation, and maintaining a healthy gut microbiome. (That's the community of helpful bacteria and other microorganisms that live in your digestive system.)
But for some people, eating more fiber also means more gas, especially at first. When you eat fiber, the gut microbes ferment it, resulting in production of gases such as hydrogen — and those gases eventually become farts.
By studying who farts more, who farts less and how flatulence changes with diet, researchers aim to understand how microbes respond to different foods and why some people can tolerate high-fiber diets comfortably while others struggle with gas.
The smart underwear is the first wearable designed to measure human flatulence. The measuring device is a small disc that snaps into the back of a person's underwear. It then uses tiny electrochemical sensors to detect hydrogen, providing insight on the wearer's flatulence. The results contribute to the Human Flatus Atlas, a research project that has recruited people around the world to wear the smart device while also documenting every meal they eat.
While it is not a medical device, researchers said the technology could eventually have applications in medicine, including helping scientists identify early signs of gastrointestinal problems.
Hall said the team hopes to help people "who show up at their doctor and say, 'I feel bloated, or 'I feel gassy,' or 'I feel abdominal pain.'"
By not just relying on people's perceptions, but instead objectively measuring the production of farts, Hall said he and other researchers can do a better job understanding their digestive issues.
About the size of a nickel in diameter, the smart underwear device uses electrochemical sensors to detect hydrogen, a gas within flatulence. – Brantley Hall
There is not a universal baseline of how many farts a day is normal, partly because it varies with each person. But that's also because, before the smart underwear, there hasn't been an efficient way to track farts. Doctors would either have to rely on a person to track their own farts or use a pretty invasive procedure to monitor them, Hall said.
"There's this guy; he's named the King of Farts," Hall said, referring to gastroenterologist Michael Levitt and his research. "He's kind of like where all the fart studies came from, and he used a very embarrassing technique to measure farts. It was rectal tubes. It was like tube in the ass and counting farts as they came out."
The smart underwear, on the other hand, allows people to go about their days while simultaneously tracking their farts. It also can detect sleep flatulence, which is "a completely understudied or unstudied scientific topic. No one really knows how people are farting in their sleep," Hall said.
The Human Flatus Atlas has recently finished its second study of smart underwear users. In the first study, users were asked to wear the device for about 12 hours a day for seven days. In that paper, published in December in the scientific journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, the researchers found that the average amount of farts was around 32 during that time period.
