Smart health wearables have spent years tracking heart rate, sleep, and blood oxygen. The gut, largely, has been left out — until now.
Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a sensor-equipped garment they call “Smart Underwear,” designed to track human flatulence continuously and objectively. The device, developed by Brantley Hall and colleagues, clips onto any standard underwear and uses electrochemical sensors to monitor intestinal gas production around the clock. According to the announcement, the sensor measures 26 × 29 × 9 millimetres — small enough to be discreet, though perhaps incompatible with tighter-fitting clothing.
The scientific case for the project is straightforward. Flatulence has no established normal range, unlike well-documented biomarkers such as blood glucose. Previous studies depended on self-reporting, a method undermined by faulty memory, poor volume estimation, and what the researchers describe as “the impossibility of logging gas while asleep.” The Smart Underwear addresses all three problems by running continuously, including through the night.
What the First Data Shows
Early results are already revising assumptions. The report states that healthy adults produced flatus an average of 32 times per day — roughly twice the figure previously accepted. Individual variation was wide, with daily totals ranging from 4 to 59 instances across participants.
Those numbers feed into a broader initiative: the Human Flatus Atlas, accessible at flatus.info, where members of the public can sign up to have their own flatulence tracked. The platform offers participants a kind of physiological profile — including whether they qualify as a “Hydrogen Hyperproducer” or a “Zen Digester,” a type the project defines as someone who barely produces gas even on a diet of baked beans.
The lead researchers have also founded a company, VentosCity, to commercialise the technology. Its website currently features a gas animation, the slogan “Measure. Master. Thrive.,” and a notice that “the future of gut health is coming soon.”
A Parallel Shift in How People Talk About AI
Separately, a quieter kind of linguistic evolution is playing out online as people search for ways to describe their relationship with AI tools. A user on Bluesky going by hikikomorphism proposed “hungry ghost trapped in a jar” as a practical test for whether any given AI application makes sense. The logic: if substituting that phrase for “AI” in a description of the task still sounds plausible, the use case is likely reasonable. “My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar,” she writes by contrast, “is deranged.”
A second coinage has emerged from the volume of AI-generated text now encountered daily — summaries, novels, meeting notes — that users did not request. Adapted from the long-established internet shorthand “tl;dr” (too long, didn’t read), the phrase “ai;dr” has begun circulating as a way to name that specific experience of encountering content that nobody asked an AI to produce.
The next step for the Smart Underwear project, according to the announcement, is a wider rollout, with data gathered feeding directly into the Human Flatus Atlas database.
Photo by Shedrack Salami on Unsplash
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