There are plenty of ways to track your health, but these days most involve wearing a device. Kohler has a new approach: an app-connected camera for your toilet that analyzes your poop and urine.
The Dekoda scanner attaches to your toilet bowl and scans the contents to reveal insights about gut health and hydration, funneling all the data into an app so you can track changes over time.
The device is admittedly unusual, but gastroenterologists say there’s value in tracking your bowel habits over time. Whether you need a device to help you do it, though, is debatable. Here are the details about the Dekoda scanner, plus what doctors think about it.
How the Dekoda Scanner Works
The device specifically uses spectroscopy to see how light interacts with your poop, while keeping track of things like how often you go, the consistency of your waste, and its shape. Dekoda can also analyze your urine to see how hydrated you are.
Not everyone who sits on the toilet will have their output analyzed, though. To use the scanner, you’ll need to hold your phone next to a sensor on the outside of the bowl or use a fingerprint analyzer to get things started. Then, Dekoda will do a continuous scan from the start to finish of your “session.”
Soon after your bathroom trip, you’ll get insights delivered to a companion app on your phone. The app tracks your toilet data over time to create a profile of your health and progress.
Kohler stresses on its website that Dekoda has “discreet optics” that analyze the contents of your toilet bowl and nothing else.
The Dekoda is powered by a rechargeable battery. When power is running low, users can remove the battery from the sensor and plug it into a USB cable.
A representative from Kohler Health did not respond to Everyday Health’s request for comment.
How Much Does the Dekoda Scanner Cost?
There are a few fees associated with the Dekoda scanner. The hardware (the camera and its housing) costs $599. To use the scanner, you also need to sign up for a Kohler Health app membership.
The cost of the app membership varies. Single users can pay $6.99 a month or $70 a year, while those with a family membership (which can analyze up to five people) can pay $12.99 a month or $130 a year.
Kohler Health App Gives You Health Insights
Like many fitness and health trackers, data from the scanner goes into a corresponding app.
The app analyzes a range of things, including your bowel movement consistency and frequency, how hydrated you appear to be, and whether there is blood in your stool. All these metrics are sorted into charts that detail this information and how it changes over time. The app also crunches data to deliver insights, like how many sessions you had in a day and a breakdown of the types of stool you passed.
The Dekoda will even give you a gut health score you can monitor over time.
What the Contents of Your Toilet Bowl Can Tell You About Your Health
While it’s a bit unconventional, gastroenterologists say there is value in looking in the toilet bowl.
“The idea of providing people more direct access to personal health data is an excellent one,” says Aditya Sreenivasan, MD, a gastroenterologist at Northwell Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “It has gained a ton of momentum in our culture, from services like 23andMe providing genetic data, companies offering microbiome testing, and laws that mandate that patients have access to their own medical records.”
But Dr. Sreenivasan says that interpreting data from the toilet bowl is “extremely challenging” for a device, especially when it comes to areas of medicine that aren’t completely understood, like the gut microbiome.
You can collect a lot of the data that the Dekoda provides simply by looking in your toilet bowl, says Rishi Naik, MD, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. “I could see potential uses for those with visual impairment or when doing colonoscopy preparation, to visually be able to see if your colonoscopy preparation has worked,” he says.
A Smart Poop Scanner Is No Replacement for Colon Cancer Screening
Dr. Naik worries that people may confuse the data offered by this device with cancer screening, and avoid future tests as a result. “It should not be confused with stool-based tests for colon cancer, which are detecting stool DNA, or fecal immunochemical tests, which detect hidden blood in the stool that this device has not been shown to pick up,” he says.
Overall, doctors recommend just checking out the contents of your toilet bowl. But whether you need a device to help with this is questionable. “Your bowel movements can be useful to evaluate for meaningful changes of your gut health,” Naik says. “Changes in stool caliber, mucus, and blood can give clues on your digestion, absorption, and overall gut health and your nutrition.”
He points out that you can use online diagrams like the Bristol Stool Chart to look for changes in your own bowel movements by looking at your poop and comparing it with the chart.
The most helpful data from a scanner like this is the ability to sense blood in the stool, Sreenivasan says. “This should trigger consideration for a colonoscopy in the right setting,” he says. “Other insights into gut health are likely more difficult to interpret. The details matter here tremendously.”
If you happen to spot blood in your stool, whether through a device or the naked eye, Sreenivasan says it’s important to contact a healthcare professional for an evaluation.
Naik says it’s also crucial to see a healthcare professional if you have persistent changes in bowel habits, like:
“These are not normal and should be evaluated,” Naik says.