Cheeky new Smart Underwear wants to track America’s flatulence — one fart at a time

Researchers at the University of Maryland want to get to the bottom of how often people pass gas — and the potential connections between a robust rectum and overall gut health.

To crack the case, they’re crowdsourcing the data by distributing Smart Underwear to volunteers coast to coast designed to scientifically determine not just who dealt it, but how many times a day.

“We thought, maybe we can advance our science by making a new type of wearable device that we can have people wear all day,” UMD’s Dr. Brantley Hall from the university’s cell biology and molecular genetics department told CBS News.

The special sauce behind the toot-tracking tech lies in purpose-built sensors about the size of a nickel, which study participants simply place inside their undergarments and let ‘er rip.

According to the study — dubbed the Human Flatus Atlas — currently published estimates of the number of times a typical person breaks wind in a typical day, which they note depends on unscientific methods like self-reporting, ranges from about 10-14.

But the data collected so far revealed that the average person actually cuts the cheese more like 30 times a day.

“More than one-in-five people report experiencing excess intestinal gas, but right now there’s no objective measure of whether they’re telling the truth or not,” Hall told the outlet.

“We obviously have physiological baselines for most measures, like blood glucose or cholesterol, but without one for flatus, it’s very hard to say when someone has excess flatus or not.”

The study represents the first attempt to definitively quantify human gas production and identify the implications about gut health and the microbiome.

The spectrum of participants is broken down into two distinct categories: “Hydrogen Hyperproducers” — reserved for the most prolific of air-biscuit layers, those who unleash 40-50 (or more) farts a day — and the comparatively silent-sphinctered “Zen Digesters,” who hardly pass gas at all.

“Our current maximum number [of farts] is about 175 times per day, and our current minimum number is four times per day. That’s a huge variation between people,” Hall said.

Hall said the project’s goal is to better understand our guts, and how what we put into them correlates with what eventually comes out.

“We’re trying to understand how different fibers affect gas production and how people can eat a healthy, high-fiber diet without experiencing excess intestinal gas,” he said.

“We need to go beyond patient perception and measure objectively. We’re in the unknown here, and it’s always an extremely exciting place to be.”