Precision medicine in the home for real-time zero-effort monitoring of health

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Our existing approach to healthcare is reactive and based on limited physiological information, collected months, years or even decades apart. Digital health technologies propose to solve this but often require individuals to actively administer self-testing. This is a daunting prospect for any individual, particularly for the elderly. We propose to overcome this with the development of a toilet-based precision healthcare platform deployed in the home to measure urinary biomarkers of disease. It is zero-effort taking samples autonomously without user intervention and can measure biomolecular signatures of health from urine over time. The aim is to take a personalised medicine approach to detect disease early at the population scale. We are developing methods to detect biomarkers of disease. There are significant, largely non-technical, barriers to the adoption of 'big-tech' precision health solutions by the general population, which we will explore and investigate strategies to solve as part of this project: we will research the barriers to adoption by users and stakeholders, how the molecular data generated can and should be used, as well as conducting pilot projects focussed on the user interaction and engagement elements of a home-based system.