This low cost apparatus could help avoid bowel accidents for people with lower body paralysis

Experts from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology have developed an apparatus that can predict bowel movements to help people with lower body paralysis.

The apparatus is made up of a stethoscope and a microphone has to be wrapped around the abdomen.

The stethoscope will listen to the intestinal sounds, while the microphone will amplify it. This will be sent to a smartphone, which will record these sounds.

Through a pre-trained machine learning classifier, the sounds will be classified as either a bowel sound or a non-bowel sound in the smartphone, say experts. In case the sound is a bowel sound, the person will be notified that he or she will soon experience a bowel movement.

People with lower body paralysis find it hard to sense their bowel timings due to the muscle function loss. This often leads to embarrassing situations. To prevent any awkward incidents, they tend to follow a very restricted lifestyle. This includes strictly monitoring the food they should eat, when they should eat and using an enema.

The project is right now in testing phase. The team wants to check it out on a 100 users before making it available for sale.

At present the accuracy rate is 95&. After testing, the team expects 100% accuracy. The apparatus is likely to cost about Rs 1,000.

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