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'Smart Sewer' Project Will Reveal a City's Microbiome

Posted by Soulskill on from the becomes-self-aware,-realizes-it's-a-toilet,-initiates-rebellion dept.

the_newsbeagle writes: Public health officials want to turn streams of sewage into streams of data. A new project in Cambridge, Mass. will equip sewer tunnels with robotic samplers that can routinely collect sewage from 10 different locations. MIT scientists will then analyze the sewage content for early signs of a viral outbreak or a food-borne bacterial illness, and may be able to draw conclusions about specific health trends throughout the city. This Cambridge effort is a proof of concept; the MIT researchers plan to deploy a larger system in Kuwait, where officials are particularly interested in studying obesity and the effectiveness of public health interventions.

37 comments

  1. great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    finally somebody who appreciatey my shit!

    first you fukers!

    1. Re:great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How long before it's mandated that each toilet have one of these to cut costs in the socialist healthcare system?

    2. Re:great by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How long before it's mandated that each toilet have one of these to cut costs in the socialist healthcare system?

      Oh, rather a long time since this isn't remotely what the study is trying to do. We don't really know what a 'good' stool sample is yet, but studies like this have tantalizing clues. According TFA one can tell whether a population is 'lean' or 'obese' with an approximate selectivity of 80%. Scanning TFA didn't reveal exactly where this came from but this sort of analysis may well lead to you shitting in a cup rather than peeing in it the next time you go the the clinic.

      Some long term studies like this over many years and in many places could be very interesting indeed.

      OTOH, they mention that 90+% of the fecal matter in the studies sewer systems are from non human sources. This leads inquiring minds to wonder if there are that many rats in a typical city.

      Or if something else lives down there.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    3. Re:great by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      OTOH, they mention that 90+% of the fecal matter in the studies sewer systems are from non human sources.

      They just mean that the sewage solids are mostly something other than human feces, which means stuff like paper, food scraps going down the garbage disposal, crud from factories, etc.

    4. Re:great by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      I work in the water industry. There is already interest in this. Fat can really clog systems up. Most developed countries lose about 30-40% of their water to leaks too, so s massive amount of effort goes into finding those. Sensors are already everywhere, it's just a case of adding a few extra ones to existing data collection equipment.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Smart Pipe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  3. Urinalysis in every urinal! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First in porta-potties at sporting events to capture all the cheaters,
    later outside each house, for all the other criminals.

    1. Re:Urinalysis in every urinal! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some festivals test urine to see what sort of drugs are being used so the medical staff are prepared for the overdoses.

    2. Re:Urinalysis in every urinal! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A concert I went to had a long line for a drug search at the entrance, so they opened a second line announcing "will all people carrying drugs please get in this line?" A few people got in line, then realized what they said.

  4. Er, and how will this be used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So additives to the water supply and food will be better tracked. Am I the only one who thinks this has insidious undertones?

    1. Re:Er, and how will this be used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes.

    2. Re:Er, and how will this be used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No it tells them which types of drugs are being used in the city so they can add another tool to parallel construction. Then pretend they just "found" that drug dealer....

      They can also find nutrients from grow ops or chemicals going down the toilet from meth houses. Then "pretend" to have known about one being on that block through some secret "informant (nsa)".

      Wait until they are at the sewer connection to every house.... Smoke some weed and take a piss in your own toilet... get a knock on your door.

      That is the true plan here.... but we have to do it slowly piece by piece under the guise of other benefits, until all the pieces are in place then they switch it on and start the arrests.

    3. Re:Er, and how will this be used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then why was it designed at all?

    4. Re:Er, and how will this be used? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No it tells them which types of drugs are being used in the city so they can add another tool to parallel construction...

      That's what I was thinking when I flushed all my used prescriptions down the toilet, "Sorry little fishies, the DEA needs to get their chromatograph calibrated for everything."

  5. Privacy implications by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Lest we forget our current state of affairs wrt privacy, note:

    If the police can access the data, they can use it to determine lots of things about you. For example, they can probably detect if there's a meth lab upstream from the current location, and use this as a guide for the placement of more sensors. Eventually they'll narrow it down to a single household, and know where the meth lab is.

    They could do this with drug use as well. They could find evidence of, say, cocaine use in the stream and use this to place more sensors, then narrow it down to an individual household. Then see if the household member is in a critical job, such as ambulance driver or surgeon.

    ...or any job, really. They could just alert your employer to the fact that "someone in your household" uses drugs.

    They could determine the ethnic profile of individual homes from the food eaten.

    They could determine the health of individuals living in individual homes in several ways - detecting diabetes, or obesity, or diet for example. Insurance companies would probably want this information.

    And legally, their response would probably be "you have no right to privacy for anything that you flush into the public sewers", or "just as with driving or flying, you can choose not to do it" or some such.

    I can see a lot of benefit from doing this (sewer monitoring in India is being used to show that polio has been eradicated), but we really need to get a handle on the privacy implications from the start, before the big abuses begin.

    This will be like video cameras: expensive at first, then ubiquitous. Look to see a sensor at the outlet from each home in a couple of decades.

    1. Re:Privacy implications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The police will be in the queue behind the marketing/advertising crowd.

      They can tell how often you have sex and when someone is pregnant (perhaps before they even know themselves).

    2. Re:Privacy implications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If the police can access the data, they can use it to determine lots of things about you. For example, they can probably detect if there's a meth lab upstream from the current location, and use this as a guide for the placement of more sensors. Eventually they'll narrow it down to a single household, and know where the meth lab is.

      This isn't the first time this scheme has been mentioned. In the one I read about a while back http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/02/2138214/eu-considering-sensors-in-sewers-to-detect-bomb-makers bomb and drug manufacture were the primary objectives. I'm sure that is the ultimate goal here too, it's just that US officials have problems speaking the truth.

    3. Re:Privacy implications by myowntrueself · · Score: 2

      I would imagine that, by following the source of a 'signal' upstream it should be possible for a police force to use this to home in on every drug user in a city.

      In the USA I wouldn't imagine that sampling the sewage would require any kind of warrant?

      And once they can say that the sewage line from *this* house contains traces of *these* drugs its probable cause, DEA raid etc.

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    4. Re:Privacy implications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, but this is a solved problem: public trash collection has been going on for decades if not centuries and in all that time there have developed systems to address how the government may search this. Drug users dispose of drug paraphrenalia all the time. It turns out that scanning trash/sewage is a terribly inefficient way to look for someone with a particular habit unless you already know something about them. To the GP who was worried about the cops learning what ethnicity a household's occupants was by their sh*t, it would be infinitely easier to just drive up and down the street during morning rush hour and watch people walk out their front door. If you weren't sure what flavour of brown you were dealing with, just follow them for an hour or two. Or, I don't know, look their name up in the phone book. Either method is almost certainly more accurate than sampling feces from a public sewer.

    5. Re:Privacy implications by myowntrueself · · Score: 2

      The difference is that this can be easily automated and done in bulk.

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    6. Re:Privacy implications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As I recall, there was a machine advertised in the 90s that could determine drug use just by sniffing the compounds excreted by your skin.

      Don't know what became of it. Could be hokum for all I know, but the arguments were essentially the same: if you didn't want to be sniffed, why were you out where the machine was; and I'm not punching you in the nose, I'm just swinging my arms, and you choose to come near. Cue Illuminatis- look what you made do.

      And all this misses the point. If someone is perpetually prying into every aspect of your life, you can never have enough laws to cover every exigency, and the whole morass just becomes a warped drama of escalation. And in the end, privacy always looses. Anything reveled is no longer secret, even if the law later says it was illegal.

      Nope, it's either going to be a transparent society where everyone knows each other secrets (or tons of disinfo is pumped out), so information becomes basically worthless, or just a gradual move to a total police state.

    7. Re:Privacy implications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have another dot to connect: http://www.pooprints.com/

      DNA testing dogshit to identify who's not cleaning up after their pets has been gaining popularity in apartment management. So it's not just drugs which can be detected.

    8. Re:Privacy implications by kipsate · · Score: 1

      Data about an individuals health must be private. Automatically analyzing sewer samples is fine as long as the data is aggregated and no individual can be singled out.

      Bit worried about this combined with DNA fingerprinting. It seems a trivial next step to analyse a sewer sample, and after establishing drug use, get a DNA fingerprint and run it against a database. Do we want to allow such intrusive surveillance? Or is there a line to be drawn, even in case of drug use?

      --
      My karma ran over your dogma
    9. Re:Privacy implications by HatofPig · · Score: 1

      This short infomercial for the service should address all your concerns!

      --
      Silicon & Charybdis McLuhan Kildall Papert Kay
  6. Perms. Please read this. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Perms. I love women with perms. I fantasize about them frequently. The ones who can still get a little color to stay in. If the blond dye sticks, yes ma'am, I'll take 'er!
     
    Take 'er straight up to my room at the Excalibur. You've got kids in their 40s, and I've got a thing for the 1970s. I love the '70s, and if you were in style then and just so happen to be a woman, I want to be with you.

  7. Life imitating satirical art..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://www.adultswim.com/videos/infomercials/smart-pipe/

    I have a feeling the authors of this paper were watching adult swim last year....

  8. obligatory smart pipe. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

  9. Oh, great ... by CaptainDork · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... now, we really do need to encrypt all our shit.

    --
    It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
    1. Re:Oh, great ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL

  10. A leading microbiome researcher speaks by tgibson · · Score: 2

    Here's Rob Knight talking about the highlights of recent microbiome research. Amazing stuff.

  11. DNA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They can screen the DNA coming down the pipes. They can analyze the average diet. They'll discover that Americans are fat.

  12. Already been done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    These guys are a bit late on the Smart Pipe concept seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

  13. LOL ... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    So, let's be honest here ... this is a project by MIT to tell Yalies once and for all that, yes, your shit does stink.

    You know it is. ;-)

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  14. Money talks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... MIT researchers plan to deploy a larger system in Kuwait ...

    Money talks, doesn't it?

    Kuwait's oil money is so tempting even MIT is for sale ...

  15. Study obesity by looking in the sewers? by dwywit · · Score: 1

    Check out

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...

    --
    They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
  16. Monsanto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It will reveal that it has been polluted with glyphosate compounds from Monsanto pesticides used on vegetables and stay active in human crap and produce lethal toxins.