Smart Underwear To Measure Your Farts
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We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper. Aristotle, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Einstein. These are the scientific giants who expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. And tonight, we're going to add another name to that list. I am here, lucky, because one of the scientists who finally invented the smart underwear that measures your farts that you needed to have is here. Yes, really. And it's actually science we're going to discuss. I'm joined by microbiologist and professor at the University of Maryland, Brantley Hall, to discuss his new smart underwear. Brantley, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. I am just, I don't even know what to say.
I'm beside myself that you have decided to come on the show. I'm not a smart technology person. I have a smartphone, but that's about it. I won't wear a watch. I won't wear a heart monitor. I won't do any of it. What you have created, I might get, if it were available. I'm not sure it is. Let's talk the fart counter underwear. Why did you create this?
What inspired the creation of smart underwear for measuring farts?
Why did you think to yourself, this is what science needs right now?
There's a huge gap in our understanding of intestinal gas. Very few studies have measured it objectively, and they involve very invasive methods like rectal tubes. So we needed a way to capture the actual experience of intestinal gas in people's day-to-day life. So we developed our wearable device that snaps onto any underwear, and you can capture the daily patterns of human flatus for the first time.
So how often are we far today? This is a serious medical question for any radio regulators listening, trying to get me in trouble. Why do we need to know that? Side note, in the lab is pulling the finger involved during any of the clinical trials. Great question.
So one in five people experience excess intestinal gas. And disorders like IBS are very common. But when a patient goes to their doctor, they just have to tell them, trust me, I have excess gas. And the doctor doesn't necessarily believe that, right? Because they don't have an objective baseline of whether the person's farting too much or not. So the patients feel unseen by their doctors. The doctors feel frustrated because they don't know whether the treatments they're prescribing are actually working or not. So there's a really big gap here.
So medicine didn't even have a baseline of what excessive gas even means. That's just a self-reported thing up until your study is what you're saying.
Exactly. Like they're not objectively measuring it. So they're just relying on patient self-reports.
And the studies that got these reports, they basically got it wrong. The number that doctors had in mind was, OK, 14 times a day. But they didn't actually know that. They didn't actually measure the things, did they?
No.
They used rectal tubes to measure that one, but it was like a couple dozen people in the 1980s. So we have no modern measurements of flatus.
Okay, let's talk about this device, because this is probably the best use of technology. We talk about AI maybe ruining the world with super soldiers, this, that, and the other. But how does the tech work? Like, it's a little thing that snaps onto my underwear?
Totally. So it works with any underwear. Bring your own underwear. So it attaches adjacent to the perineum with a snap. It fits in that space. Most people find it comfortable. In fact, very few people have ever quit because it's uncomfortable. People quit because they forget about it. Then they wear it into the ocean, for example. So it's so comfortable, people forget about it. It sits there adjacent to the perineum and it measures the gas present in flatus.
Why is understanding intestinal gas important for health?
And what's really interesting is that farts are composed primarily of gut microbial metabolites, hydrogen and carbon dioxide. And we measure the hydrogen present in the fart.
So it's not just the number of times a day that the gas that's in there can tell us things about how healthy our stomachs and our gut, the bacteria in our stomach, our gut microbiome is?
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