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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

By the time sewage sludge reaches a treatment plant, it's been watered down and is useless as a sample but where it exits homes human waste can be a rich source of biological information. Now David Common writes at CBC News that robots may soon wander permanently in our sewers [www.cbc.ca], just below our homes and neighborhoods, analyzing our diets and our health as they suck up what we flush down. A team at MIT already have a project called Underworlds where they lower Luigi — a tube-like robot — to just above the sewage [mit.edu]. Then, controlled by a smartphone app, Luigi drops tubes into the stream. A small pump sucks up the liquid and runs it through a filter. Subsequent analysis in the laboratory typically finds 50,000 different bacteria, a host of viruses and other matter that, until a short time earlier, were inside a person. Future plans include self-propelled robots with extremely long battery lives, capable of navigating among neighborhoods, analyzing sewage contents while in the sewer itself and relaying information wirelessly to a central authority. MIT's plan is to start testing the robot in the sewers in up to 10 sites throughout Cambridge [ieee.org]. In this way, they hope to gain a sense of the geographic diversity of sewage signals across the city.

Real-time data collected from sewage could allow health officials to detect an outbreak of flu or a spreading foodborne illness [ieee.org], or know when a population is stressed out or becoming obese. "One of the holy grails of this project during its inception was to identify viral outbreaks," says Jessica Snyder. Long before people visit a doctor's office, they visit the toilet. So a highly contagious pathogen, such as norovirus or Ebola, could be identified soon after infection — and treatment could be targeted at that neighborhood. Luigi could also be used to identify neighborhoods where heroin use is spiking. In Europe, a study of sewage from 42 cities revealed that cocaine and ecstasy use was greatest in large metropolises on weekends [wiley.com], whereas cannabis and methamphetamine use was more evenly distributed throughout the week in towns of all sizes. “The MIT project is extremely ambitious and pioneering,” says Christian Daughton. “If this project proves successful in demonstrating some sort of proof of principal, it could represent a significant, seminal advancement in the prospects for quickly and inexpensively monitoring public health in real time.”

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