Hungarian Inventor Touts "Life-Saving" Toilet Seat

It's no secret that some of the most brilliant ideas are thought up while their creators are on the john. Now, a young logistics expert from Debrecen has come up with an apparently brilliant innovation focused on the very act of sitting on the toilet. According to the always indispensable Blikk, 33-year-old Zoltán Bíró has invented a toilet seat that can measure a person's blood pressure and other vital signs while they are safely parked on the potty. Biró calls the seat a "life-saving" device that could revolutionize preventative medicine. From what we can tell, it might really be true, or at least true enough to make us refrain from turning the whole story into one extended poo joke. Well, almost.

While the exact operational details of the miracle john are sketchy, the basic idea seem pretty straightforward - you sit down on the seat and it tells you if you show signs of hypertension or a few other common conditions. While not saying where exactly the idea came to him, Biró says he began working on the problem after a colleague of his died from an undiagnosed case of high blood pressure, and another almost succumbed to a dangerous fall in blood pressure brought on by an adverse reaction to hypertension drugs.

Medical detectors similar to the Biró seat already exist, including ones implanted in computer "mice" and other devices that passively come into contact with the users' skin. But Biró says the toilet seat he has developed would be more effective and "discreet" than other such gizmos. Meanwhile, according to Biró, who is apparently not related to the famous inventor of the eponymous Biró or "bic" pen, the device would be safe and sturdy, as the measuring equipment is embedded in the seat, so "humidity" cannot foul the electronics.

Like all great innovators, Biró stresses that his invention is still a work in progress, and is currently focusing on how information from the seat is displayed to those sitting on it. He not only plans to have a sign in front of the "patient" with a readout of their vitals, but a unique method of warning them if they are - er - excessively stressing themselves. If a person's blood pressure or other vitals is dangerously abnormal, the machine would play a particular memorable song - the theme from the American hospital drama "E.R."