Home appliance brand Kohler is getting into the smart camera business, although its new camera isn’t designed to catch crooks in the act. Instead, Kohler’s smart cam is aimed at something more personal: your poop.
Yes, the jokes are irresistible, but Kohler Health’s Dekoda camera does have a serious purpose: to analyze your stool and give you insights about your gut health and other potential health issues.
The Dekoda itself is a small (8.13 x 3.74 x 3.43-inch), flat, oval-shaped unit that clips onto the side of your toilet, allowing an optical sensor to take aim at the bottom of your toilet bowl.
You can then go ahead and use the toilet normally—and if you’re worried about privacy (which seems reasonably given what the camera is looking at), you can log in prior to each “session” using the Kohler Health app or a fingerprint scanner on the included authenticator remote.
The images snapped by the Dekoda are protected by end-to-end encryption, Kohler says, and the optical sensor always points down into the toilet, not toward your nether regions.
The Dakota’s optical sensor always points down into the toilet.
Kohler Health
Powered by an AI model based on the Bristol Stool Chart and trained on more than a million data points, the Dekoda can track your bowel movements, looking for “gut health indicators” such as the shape and consistency of your stool, your overall hydration, and how frequently you go. The sensor also keeps an eye out for blood in the toilet, a key warning sign of a serious health problem.
Data collected by the Dekoda will be funneled into the Kohler Hearth app, which can show you the results for each session (including the quantity of regular, hard, and loose stool), as well as your stool frequency and even a gut health score, expressed as a percentage. The app can track your gut health results over time, as well.
The Dekoda connects to your home network via Wi-Fi, and it’s rechargeable (a power adapter and USB cable are included).
At $599 and available now for preorder (it’s slated to ship this month), Kohler Health’s Dekoda isn’t cheap, and it also requires a subscription plan that costs either $7 a month or $70 for an entire year.
But for those of us with occasional gut issues or anyone who wants to dig deeper into their health (and yes, this is quite the deep dive), the Dekoda could deliver some fascinating insights.
