New low: Technocrats are developing smart underwear to track your farts

“The technocrats’ mechanistic worldview demands ever more data about every aspect of the universe. Mapping your DNA and the human brain are two prime examples. But when it comes to tracking farts, they’re really scratching the surface. If this story hadn’t appeared on MSN, I would have thought it was a joke. Sadly, I wasn’t. They take their work very seriously.” – Patrick Wood, journalist

Now, smart underwear provides an argument for paying closer attention to what comes out of the body. Its developers explained that they hope tracking flatulence could one day give researchers new insights into digestive health – and how a person’s farts can provide clues about what’s going on in their gut.

Brantley Hall, the brain behind the smart underwear and associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Maryland, said the team’s “ultimate mission” is to help people eat a high-fibre diet without suffering from severe intestinal gas.

In the United States, an estimated 95% of Americans do not consume enough dietary fibre. This nutrient plays a crucial role in digestive health, regulating blood sugar and cholesterol, and maintaining a healthy gut microbiome . (This is the community of beneficial bacteria and other microorganisms that live in our digestive system.)

For some people, however, a higher fibre intake also means more gas, especially at the beginning. When we eat fibre, gut microbes ferment it, producing gases like hydrogen – and these gases eventually become flatulence.

By investigating who farts more, who farts less, and how flatulence modifies with diet, researchers aim to understand how microbes react to different foods and why some people tolerate high-fibre diets without problems, while others struggle with flatulence.

The smart underwear is the first wearable device designed to measure human flatulence. The measuring device is a small disc that attaches to the back of the underwear. It then uses tiny electrochemical sensors to detect hydrogen, providing insights into the wearer’s flatulence. The results are incorporated into the Human Flatus Atlas, a research project that has recruited people worldwide to wear the smart device while simultaneously documenting every meal they eat.

There’s no universally accepted guideline for how many farts per day are normal, partly because it varies from person to person. Before smart underwear, there was no efficient way to track farts. Doctors either had to rely on a person counting their own farts or use a fairly invasive procedure to monitor them, Hall said.

“There’s this guy who’s called the King of Farts,” Hall said, referring to gastroenterologist Michael Levitt and his research. “He’s kind of the one all fart studies started with, and he used a very embarrassing technique to measure farts. It involved rectal tubes. It was like a tube up your butt that counted the farts as they came out.”

Smart underwear, on the other hand, allows people to go about their daily lives while simultaneously tracking their farts. It can also detect flatulence during sleep, which is “a completely under-researched or unexplored scientific topic.” “Nobody really knows how people fart in their sleep,” Hall said.

The Human Flatus Atlas recently completed its second study with users of its smart underwear. In the first study, participants were asked to wear the device for approximately twelve hours a day for seven days. In this work, published in December in the scientific journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, researchers found that the average number of farts during this period was around 32.

For the new study, which collected data from more than 500 volunteers, participants were asked to wear the device for at least 22 hours a day for between three and 30 days, removing it only for activities such as showering and using the toilet. Hall said the team plans to publish the new study soon.

He hopes that with the help of smart underwear, doctors will one day be able to better understand what is going on in the gut and eventually recognize patterns that could help in the diagnosis or monitoring of certain digestive diseases.

Hall cited a 2023 study that examined the digestive problems of nearly 89,000 Americans who participated in the National GI Survey II. The researchers found that about one in four had problems related to gas, whether in the form of bloating, excessive flatulence, or abdominal pain.

Dr. Jordan Axelrad agreed that smart underwear could one day “allow continuous, non-invasive measurement of microbial metabolic activity under real-life, everyday conditions” and might even help researchers detect gastrointestinal problems before they fully develop. Axelrad, an associate professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and co-director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Centre at NYU Langone Health, was not involved in the Human Flatus Atlas project.

Generally, people don’t need to worry about the amount of gas they pass unless it is accompanied by other problems such as bloating, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, constipation, weight loss, blood in the stool, or a modification in bowel habits, Axelrad said.

“Passing gas is a normal and important part of digestive health,” Axelrad said. “Most intestinal gas is produced when bacteria in the large intestine ferment carbohydrates that our bodies don’t fully digest. That’s why the amount of gas we produce can vary considerably depending on what we eat, the composition of our gut microbiome, and even how much air we swallow – with enormous personal differences.”

Dr. Trisha Pasricha, a physician and scientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, added that in her practice she frequently sees people who suspect they have excessive flatulence, when in fact it is within the normal range.

“People often worry that they fart more than average because it’s so embarrassing for all of us – nobody counts how often they fart and shares that number with their best friend,” said Pasricha. She was also not involved in the Human Flatus Atlas project.

On the other hand, if someone notices that they haven’t passed any gas at all and simultaneously have abdominal pain and no bowel movements, this is a medical emergency that could indicate a bowel obstruction. In this case, the person should seek medical help immediately, she said.

“Currently, we still have a lot of work ahead of us to understand how modifications in the gut microbiome are actually related to diseases and how modifications in our diet can influence diseases that at first glance seem to have nothing to do with the gut – such as cardiovascular diseases or dementia, which may ultimately be influenced by our gut bacteria,” said Pasricha.

“There is no good data to show that the number of farts alone indicates that something is wrong or points to a specific disease,” Pasricha said. “It can be a symptom of certain conditions – for example, celiac disease or lactose intolerance – but there’s no clear link between illness and the number of farts, so to speak. In fact, people often experience more gas when they increase their fibre intake, especially at the beginning, and that’s usually something good and not a warning sign.”

yogaesoteric
September 16, 2026