“In search of the ideal intestine”: Excrement tracking cameras claim to provide health information. Are they necessary? | Health and wellness

YesYou can buy a smart ring to track your sleep activity or a smart watch to monitor your heart rate. So perhaps it makes sense that the next frontier in health technology has come for your toilet. Here is: Dekoda, the new toilet camera from Kohler. No, not that kind of toilet camera: this one only takes photos down inside the bowl, sending the snaps to an app that analyzes stool samples and assesses 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 description says. “Notice changes sooner, refine your daily choices, and feel more confident every day.”

You may be wondering: who is this for? Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek once noted that traditional German toilets have “poop shelves”, where “the poops are first laid out so that we can sniff and inspect them for traces of disease”, while French toilets have a hole in the back, to make “the excrement disappear as quickly as possible”. Somewhere in the middle is the American toilet, “a bowl filled with water, so that shit floats in it, visible, but not inspectable.”

Clearly, Žižek hasn’t spent enough time on TikTok; In a world obsessed with optimization, bowel tracking has become almost as popular as sleep tracking or step counting. People share their “poop diaries” on the app, recording every time they have two each month. “I pooped 329 days this year,” one woman said in a 2024 TikTok. “A poop weighs about ¼[lb] at 1 pound. So if you take it at ¼, that’s about 131 pounds that I’ve pooped this year.

The Bristol Stool Scale, a clinical assessment tool developed by doctors to classify samples into seven different categories – types three (“sausage-like but with cracks”) and four (“sausage-like or snake-like, smooth and soft”) being the gold standard – frequently makes appearances on the social media pages of gut health influencers.

The chart helps doctors diagnose irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which used to be a diagnosis you could keep to yourself. Not anymore: in 2022, Allure magazine proclaimed “We are 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 of trash as something you throw away, but it actually contains a lot of information about us,” says Kash Kapadia, CEO of Kohler Health. “It literally came from us, and now we can study it in a way that doesn’t require you to manipulate it.”

The device starts working as soon as a user decides to “start session”, by simply tapping their fingerprint. “Just when your urine reaches the toilet water level, the camera will start flashing its LED light,” says Kapadia. The images are then uploaded to Kohler’s cloud and analyzed via “proprietary algorithms” that take approximately three to five minutes to process before the results are visible on the user’s app.

Although Kohler says the camera has “privacy-focused features” like fingerprint authentication and end-to-end encryption, it’s understandable why many wouldn’t trust a toilet tracking camera.

Joana Gaia, a clinical professor of management sciences at the University at Buffalo who studies health data systems, says the idea of ​​a poop camera is “less invasive” than a Fitbit or Apple Watch, which collect more data. “Kohler is not a medical organization, so they are not covered by Hipaa. [the US law on medical privacy]“, she adds. “It’s something that comes up a lot with healthcare-related apps.”

(When 23andMe, the at-home genetic testing company, filed for bankruptcy, many feared it would sell the data of more than 14 million customers to a third party. Ultimately, the data went to a nonprofit founded by the company’s former CEO, Anne Wojcicki, which intends to use it for medical research.)

“The concern for me comes from knowing what data [the Dekoda] collection,” adds Gaia. “Who owns all this data and what could they potentially do with it?”

“We recognize that this is a very personal space, and we’ve taken that very seriously in how we’ve designed privacy and security,” says Kapadia. Although Dekoda shares anonymized feces data with unspecified business “partners,” it will not share the data with a doctor or family members. Currently, Dekoda doesn’t share its data with Apple Health or Google, but Kapadia says that could change “if people want it.”

Amanda Sauceda, a registered dietitian based in Long Beach, California, isn’t really surprised that poop cameras exist. “I think with the increase in colon cancer among young people, there’s more and more talk about looking at what’s inside the toilet bowl,” she says, referring to the sharp increase in the disease among people under 50, which many experts attribute to ultra-processed foods. “It’s another way [for companies] to capitalize on this.

She worries that too much focus on a poop’s appearance could be detrimental. “There’s this idea when it comes to gut health that you’re always striving for these big, beautiful, smooth, snake-like droppings, when that’s really not realistic,” she says. “I could see how these devices could make people obsessed with pursuing the ‘ideal gut’.”

Ashley Oswald, a dietitian based in Minneapolis, adds that bacteria in stool changes within two days of a new diet, which could diminish the importance of timely stool data. “Is it really useful to know the bacteria in your stool when everything could change in two days? she asked. “We lose sight of the basics when we follow trends. It’s interesting and fun to track your bowel movements, but how many people do things that significantly influence the gut, like eating enough fiber or being active?”

Sauceda tracks his own movements using the Bristol map. “I always say that looking at your poop is like a report card: it’s a good way for us to know what’s going on in our intestines,” 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.” Sauceda’s tracking method is completely free. “You don’t need a fancy camera to look at your poop.”