‘Smart underwear’ could help uncover mysteries of human flatulence
An intrepid team of scientists has created “smart underwear” to measure human flatulence to better understand our farts.
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Whether you’re blowing air, farting loudly or farting rapidly, flatulence – whether you want to admit it or not – is as much of a daily necessity as breathing. But exactly how often the average person lets someone rip and what it says about their body is a mystery.
“We don’t really know what normal flatus production looks like,” said Brantley Hall, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland. in a statement. (Flatus is the technical term for farts.) “Without that baseline, it’s hard to know when someone’s gas production is truly excessive,” he said.
Smart Underwear, a wearable device co-created by Hall and his colleagues, may help answer that thorny question.
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The wearable is not actually underwear, but rather a device that clips onto clothing and uses chemical sensors to track intestinal gas, specifically hydrogen, which is produced by microorganisms in the gut. Typically, farts are a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen produced by the body, along with hydrogen obtained from microorganisms and sometimes methane.
Brantley Hall, University of Maryland
In a study of the device, Hall and his team found that healthy adults farted about 32 times a day — although some farted only four times, while others farted as many as 59 times a day. However, the study did not measure whether the farts were smelly or audible.
Hall and his team tested the device on 38 healthy adults, who wore it in their underwear for a week while awake, except during heavy exercise or travel. The participants followed a special low-fibre diet, although half were given fiber supplements during the study – which made them produce more hydrogen gas – to see if smart underwear could make a difference. As expected, smart underwear figured it out increased microbiome activity According to a paper describing a recently published study, in the presence of fiber Biosensors and Bioelectronics:.
The range of daily fart frequency “challenges the notion that the average amount of flatulence per day can adequately describe human physiology,” Hall and his co-authors write in the paper. Knowing how much the average person farts can help inform treatment for people who experience excessive flatulence or other problems.
Smart underwear is just a first step; Hall also launched human flatus atlas To recruit and measure flatulence across the population. Specifically, researchers are interested in studying people who eat high-fiber diets but don’t fart much and people who do fart. Very.
“We’ve learned a lot about which microbes live in the gut, but we know less about what they’re actually doing at any given time,” Hall said in the statement. The Human Flatus Atlas can help establish a population-wide baseline for flatulence, and in turn help develop better treatments for gut health.
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