Privacy-Preserving Automatic Collection of Acoustic Voiding Events

Uroflowmetry is a non-invasive diagnostic test used to evaluate the function of the urinary tract. Despite its benefits, it has two main limitations: high intra-subject variability of flow parameters and the requirement for patients to urinate on demand. To overcome these limitations, we have developed a low-cost ultrasonic platform that utilizes machine learning (ML) models to automatically detect and record natural in-home voiding events, without any need for user intervention. This platform operates outside of human-audible frequencies, providing privacy-preserving, automatic uroflowmetries that can be conducted at home as part of daily routines. After evaluating several machine learning algorithms, we found that the Multi-layer Perceptron classifier performed exceptionally well, with a classification accuracy of 97.8% and a low false negative rate of 1.2%. Furthermore, even on lightweight SVM models, performance remains robust. Our results also showed that the voiding flow envelope, helpful for diagnosing underlying pathologies, remains intact even when using only inaudible frequencies.