Posted on 05/09/2026 5:50:12 PM PDT by Red Badger
A wearable gas sensor called “Smart Underwear” attached to the inside of people’s underwear monitors hydrogen gas emissions to track digestive health in real time.
Image credit:© iStock.com, Nadezhda Kurbatova
Just one bite of ice cream or a sip of a milkshake can’t hurt too much, right? Anyone with lactose intolerance knows that this bargaining usually results in some uncomfortable gut sensations and stinky side effects about 30 minutes to a couple of hours later.
People with lactose intolerance cannot breakdown lactose, the natural sugar in dairy products. When gut microbes encounter this unabsorbed lactose, they ferment it and release hydrogen gas, which exits the body as flatulence. While most people with lactose intolerance find that they fart more after eating food with dairy, not all of them report doing so. Breath analysis is one way to measure hydrogen gas produced by gut microbes, but researchers can’t use it for continuous monitoring. Currently, there is no way to objectively measure continuous gas production in the gut for lactose intolerance or any other digestive condition, limiting what researchers can learn about the connection between gut metabolism and these symptoms. Brantley Hall, a gut microbiome researcher at the University of Maryland, and his team, however, designed a new device to change that.
Using a “Smart Underwear” gas sensor that attaches to the inside of underwear, the researchers found that people with lactose intolerance fart much more than they think.1 The findings, which the team reported at the Digestive Disease Week 2026 meeting, present new insight into how people perceive their own flatulence and a continuous method to monitor gut metabolism, which could help scientists better understand gastrointestinal conditions like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
“We have spent years learning which microbes live in the gut and what genes they carry but actually measuring what those microbes are doing in real time, in a living person going about their day, has remained out of reach,” Hall said in a press statement. “Hydrogen gas is one of the most direct readouts of microbial fermentation activity, and we realized that if we could measure it continuously and non-invasively, we would have a window into gut microbial metabolism that nobody had before.”
To find out how often people actually fart after eating lactose, Hall and his team enrolled 37 generally healthy participants without IBS symptoms in a four-day, randomized crossover study. Participants consumed 20g of lactose or 20g of sucrose and then wore Smart Underwear for the next eight hours. The following day they repeated the process but ate the opposite sugar. Smart Underwear work by continuously monitoring for farts while also collecting data on temperature, humidity, and movement.2
The researchers found that of the 37 participants, 24 were likely lactose intolerant due to their elevated microbiome activity on the day they ate lactose compared to sucrose. To the team’s surprise, of the 24 people with presumed lactose intolerance, only 12 out of the 24 reported that they farted more after eating lactose. But the Smart Underwear told a different story—22 out of the 24 people actually farted more.
“People aren’t reliable narrators about their flatulence patterns,” Hall said. What he found most intriguing about these results was that “gas production and gas perception are not the same thing, and our data suggest the gap between them is larger and more common than most of us assumed. That has real implications for how we design studies and interpret symptom-based outcomes.”
Hall hopes that Smart Underwear can help researchers and clinicians better understand what normal gas production in the gut looks like and how it might change due to various diseases. He’s eager to collaborate with other teams to conduct more studies that would benefit from continuous gas monitoring of the gut microbiome. “This is the beginning, not the end,” he said.
References
Abstract Mo1690. A Smart Underwear device reveals discordance between objective intestinal gas production and subjective symptom perception. DDW 2026.
Botasini S, et al. Smart underwear: A novel wearable for long-term monitoring of gut microbial gas production via flatus. Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X. 2025;27:100699.
Meet the Author
Stephanie DeMarco, PhD
Stephanie earned her PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019 where she studied parasitology and microbiology. She was an editor at Drug Discovery News from 2021 to 2025 where she spearheaded the podcast program and led the editorial team. She joined The Scientist as the Managing Editor in 2025. Her work has appeared in Discover Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times among others.
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Hehehe. One dog barks at her farts. Another one of my dogs will drop a death bomb fart and go away making sure I am the only one who gets to enjoy the stink. You know it’s bad when the dog won’t even stick around because her farts are so bad.
Based upon the informal surveys I've conducted at numerous social gatherings (cocktail parties, etc.), I'd say he was right.
All my questions usually garner is a weird look.
HELPFUL HINT: The underwear sensor should be connected to a flashing display worn on the lapel.
And I'm thinking that a Jumbotron showing the worst offenders might be useful, too.
Regards,
Why don’t they just use their own for monitoring?
Ya got a whole team of azzbags generating gas everyday...
Well, if some have not yet woken to that fact yet, it’s doubtful they ever will.
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This is likely nothing more than people trying to dream up ideas for getting research grant money. For God’s sake, all animals fart, some more than others. Those who have worked behind draft horses using field implements in farm fields know this all too well. Then there are the Al Gores of the world who want to get rid of all bovines. It’s a normal thing, it proves the digestive system is working. Doctors will ask you if you are in the hospital and able to get up from the bed and walk around if you have passed any gas as a sign your digestive system is working properly. Much to do about nothing by people who have nothing to do with their time.
I’ll give you credit for finfingvhhis article.... My only question is how did you stumble upon it?
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I have Ulcerative Colitis. Same here. There are days….😖😬
Dog farts are off the scale entirely 😵💫
Thanks for posting, I’m gonna start catching up “Space Aliens Stole My Face!” Ed Anger, lol!
A Jumbotron in a stadium? The stadium probably wouldn’t need lights at nighttime games…
I have a range of science websites bookmarked, so anything interesting or entertaining can come up!.......😎
I’m diabetic, with Cronic Pancreatitis..I’d be the same way LOL
RE: “Space Aliens Stole My Face!”
Can’t we get someone to dox Spanberger, Maxine, Clyburn, Swalwell, Joy Reid, Maddow and Katie Porter?
Expression to lose face (丢脸 (diū liǎn) in Chinese, would be a way to beautify the world.
Too funny.
“Here I sit, broken-hearted....”
All well and good until they have yer skivvies reporting to a government agency dedicated to protecting the environment by tracking flatulence. As usual, they’d be exempt from their own laws. One bean burrito too many and the Flatulence Administration Regulation Team would be on the way with the paddy wagon.
Clear the room if you can. Bask in greatness.
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