Cameras are behind smart home advancements from navigating robot vacs to smart fridges that know what's on the shelves – but a new spin-off from Kohler has announced a new unusual smart home product: a toilet camera. The Kohler Health Dekoda is a health tracker that attaches to your toilet to monitor gut health and hydration.
The Dekoda is a smart home camera that mounts over the rim of the toilet bowl and points down at the contents of the bowl – and only the contents of the bowl, Kohler Health says. Using a mix of optical sensors and machine learning algorithms, the Dekoda delivers personalized health recommendations to a mobile app. The iOS app is available at launch, with an Android version in the works.
The camera’s glimpse into the bowl allows users to track health factors like hydration and gut health, and the company says it can even detect blood. The company says Dakoda looks for patterns like shape, consistency, and frequency to look for gut health patterns. The toilet camera also looks for visual markers of hydration.
The camera isn’t the only key to tracking gut health. The device also uses spectroscopy, which is the scientific study of color, in order to better understand what the optical sensors are seeing. (It’s designed to work with light-colored toilets and doesn’t work with dark colored toilets, such as black.)
Any smart home product designed to be used in the bathroom is going to raise privacy concerns, but Kohler built the Dekoda with a fingerprint scanner remote control, which powers fingerprint authentication for both privacy as well as to avoid mixing your results with other members of the household. The company also says that the data has end-to-end encryption.
The device sits over the rim of the toilet using an adjustable clamp. The device is removed for recharging via USB-C.
While the Dekoda may solicit giggles from those with a sense of potty humor and cringes from the privacy wary, the device isn’t the first attempt at a smart toilet. Options already exist from Throne Science and U Scan Nutrio, for example. A study from 2023 suggested that smart toilets may be helpful for passive health tracking with minimal user input and could even potentially identify diseases at an earlier stage, but the study also addressed ethical concerns about data sharing.
The Kohler Health Dekoda, only available in the US, retails for $599. The Kohler Health app is subscription-based, with plans starting at $70 a year or $6.99 a month for single users. Families can track multiple members with a $130 a year or $12.99 a month family plan.
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