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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Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
True.
Some of us old guys would need really high performance and durable underwear hardware.
I have Crohn’s Disease. I’d overload the system.
Sorry to hear about that Crohn's affliction. That is a bad situation.
Farts? Was this written by Dr. Lexus?
“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.”
I’ve seen dogs that are startled, frightened or angry at their own flatulence production. We need fart detecting underwear for dogs to get to the bottom this. For science.
Freegards
I would prefer software.
I will stick with my dumb underpants, thank you.
Hydrogen isn’t what smells. It is sulfur. And methane is what ignites.
No.
This thread could potentially devolve into the subject of astronomy.
My uncle had asteroids. He had to sit on a pillow sometimes.
My 11 month old Maltese puppy dog does the same 😂
I understand it can affect Uranus.
I fart in your general direction.
Shouldn’t that headline have been on the Weekly World News?
https://imgur.com/gallery/classic-weekly-world-news-covers-g6lLs
Survivors found still alive on the Titanic. Ape Goes To College—scores 150 on IQ test and awarded scholarship. Kitten Guilty of Murder—Sign petition Inside Or Fluffy Dies....
I make sure there are plenty of people around to document my farts.
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