Defecation Prediction System Using Bowel Sound

Abstract

Fecal incontinence is a serious but popular problem for elderly people since it not only degrades their quality of physical and mental life but also increases the work of care givers. One promising tool to solve this problem is a defecation prediction system since a patient can go to toilet if he/she knows the time of excretion in advance. Our approach to develop such a system is to measure bowel sounds (BSs) using a wearable device, to predict the defecation time, and to informs the user before defecation. As a first step to the development, in this paper, it is shown that BSs include information of the defecation time by classifying the BSs before/after defecation. The classification is possible by detect the change of the power in the spectrogram of the BSs.