Products like Dekoda and Throne claim to offer health insights by tracking bowel movements – but who owns that data?
Y
ou can buy a smart ring to track your sleep activity or a smartwatch to monitor your heartbeat, so perhaps it makes sense that health tech’s next frontier has come for your toilet. Behold: Dekoda, Kohler’s new toilet cam. No, not that type of toilet cam: this one only shoots pictures down at what is inside the bowl, sending the snaps to an app that analyzes stool samples and rates your gut health. The Dekoda can be yours for $599, plus an annual subscription fee.
Kohler’s new product joins Throne, a $319 offering from an Austin-based startup. “Throne captures stool and hydration patterns, hands-free and automatically,” the camera’s description reads. “Notice shifts sooner, fine-tune daily choices, and feel more confident, every day.”
You might wonder: Who is this for? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once noted that traditional German toilets have “poo shelves”, where “shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness,” while French toilettes have a hole in a back, to make feces “disappear as quickly as possible”. Somewhere in the middle are American toilets, “a basin full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected”.
