YesYou can buy a smart ring to track your sleep activity or a smartwatch to monitor your heartbeat, so perhaps it makes sense that the next frontier in medical technology has arrived for your toilet. Here it is: Dekoda, Kohler's new toilet chamber. No, this is not a toilet camera: it only takes pictures. down what's inside the bowl, sending snapshots to an app that analyzes stool samples and assesses your gut health. Dekoda can be yours for $599 plus an annual subscription fee.
Kohler's new product joins Throne, a $319 offering from the Austin startup. “The throne captures bowel movements and hydration patterns automatically and hands-free,” the camera description says. “See changes faster, adjust your daily choices, and feel more confident every day.”
You may be wondering: who is this for? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek once noted that traditional German toilets have “poo shelves” where “the shit is put out first so we can smell it and check for signs of disease,” while French toilets have a hole in the back so that the poop “disappears as quickly as possible.” Somewhere in the middle are American toilets, “a basin full of water so that shit floats in it, visible but not inspected.”
Clearly Zizek didn't spend enough time on TikTok; in a world obsessed with optimization, contemplation of a chair has become almost as popular as sleep tracking or step counting. People share their “poo logs” on the app, recording each time they reach two each month. “I pooped 329 days this year,” one woman said in a 2024 TikTok. “Poop weighs about ¼[lb] up to 1 lb. So, based on ¼, that’s about 131 pounds I’ve pooped this year.”
Bristol chair scalesThe clinical assessment tool, developed by doctors to classify samples into seven different categories – type three (“like a sausage, but with cracks”) and type four (“like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft”) is the gold standard – often appears on the social media pages of gut health influencers.
The chart helps doctors diagnose irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which was once considered a diagnosis to keep to yourself. No longer: in 2022 Allure magazine proclaimed “We're entering an era of IBS empowerment,” with more doctors studying the syndrome and women rallying around the theory that “hot girls have stomach problems.”
“People think waste is something you flush away, but it actually contains a lot of information about us,” says Kash Kapadia, CEO of Kohler. Health. “It literally comes from us, and now we can study it in a way that you don’t have to handle it.”
The device starts working as soon as the user decides to “start a session” by tapping their fingerprint. “Just when your urine reaches the level of the water in the toilet, the camera will start flashing an LED,” says Kapadia. The images are then uploaded to the Kohler cloud and analyzed using “proprietary algorithms,” which take three to five minutes to process before the results are visible in the user’s app.
While Kohler says the camera boasts “privacy-focused features” like fingerprint authentication and end-to-end encryption, it's understandable that many don't trust the restroom security camera.
Joana Gaia, a clinical professor of management at the University at Buffalo who studies health data systems, says the feeding camera idea is “less invasive” than the Fitbit or Apple Watch, which collect more data. “Kohler is not a healthcare organization, so Hipaa does not cover them. [the US law on medical privacy]”, she adds. “This is something that is often seen in healthcare-related applications.”
(When 23andMe, an at-home genetic testing company, filed for bankruptcy, many feared it would sell the data of its more than 14 million customers to a third party. The data eventually went to a nonprofit founded by the company's former CEO, Anna Wojcicki, which intends to use it for medical research.)
“What worries me is what data [the Dekoda] – Gaia adds. “Who owns all this data and what can they potentially do with it?”
“We understand that this is a very personal space and we took that very seriously when designing privacy and security,” says Kapadia. Although Dekoda shares anonymous fecal data with unspecified business “partners,” it will not share this data with a doctor or family members. Dekoda doesn't share its data with Apple Health or Google at the moment, but Kapadia says that could change “if people want it.”
Amanda Sauceda, a registered dietitian in Long Beach, California, isn't particularly surprised by the existence of feeding chambers. “I think especially with the rise in colon cancer rates among young people, there's more talk about actually looking at what's inside the toilet,” she says, citing sharp increase disease in people under 50, which many experts attribute to ultra-processed foods. “This is another way [for companies] to benefit from it.”
She worries that paying too much attention to the appearance of poop could be detrimental. “With gut health, there's this idea that you're always striving for that big, beautiful, smooth, snake-like poop, when in reality that's just not realistic,” she says. “I could see how these devices could make people obsessed with the pursuit of the 'perfect gut.'
Ashley Oswald, a registered dietitian in Minneapolis, adds that bacteria in stool changes within two days of starting a new diet, which may make timely stool data less important. “Is it really that useful to know about the bacteria in your stool when everything can change within two days?” she asked. “We lose sight of the basics when we chase trends. It's interesting and fun to keep track of your poop, but how many people are doing things that have a significant impact on their gut, like eating enough fiber or staying active?”
Sauceda tracks his movements using a Bristol chart. “I always say that looking at your poop is like a report card: it's a good way to learn what's going on inside our gut,” she says. “You don't always feel different when you take a probiotic, but I definitely feel different if I don't poop every day.” The Sauceda tracking method is completely free. “You don't need a fancy camera to look at your poop.”
