Why Kohler Wants To Mount A $599 AI Camera On Your Toilet
The next step in personal health tracking has arrived, and it’s a tiny bit, well, gutsy. Plumbing giant Kohler has officially launched Dekoda (decoder, get it?), a slim, clip-on device that attaches discreetly to your existing toilet bowl and deploys a small camera and sensors to analyze your number ones and twos. Yes, dear reader, the Dekoda will now take guesswork out of the whole process (e.g. floater or sinker: good or bad) and analyze the health of your output like a personal urologist and gastroenterologist.
The $599 Dekoda, unveiled under the new banner of Kohler Health, uses optical spectroscopy and machine-learning algorithms to decode a host of personalized health data. The device can non-invasively track hydration levels, identify gut health patterns (looking at frequency and form), and even detect trace amounts of blood—a feature that could, in theory, offer an early warning for more serious conditions.
“We’re establishing an entirely new vision for the bathroom—a room where many start and end their day—as a powerful space for proactive insights,” said Kohler Health CEO Kash Kapadia. The company aims to make health tracking "passive, precise, and profoundly personal."
Just think about it, the concept is simple but rather profound: the bathroom is the one place we visit multiple times a day, offering a perfect, passive health check-in point. When you sit down, the Dekoda is ready. It uses a wall-mounted fingerprint sensor/remote on its side to identify the user, ensuring the right person's data—whether it's hydration score or weekly bowel movement regularity—is uploaded via end-to-end encryption to your personal profile on the Kohler Health app.
The team at Kohler is quick to address the inevitable elephant in the room: privacy. The camera, the team stresses, is fixed to look only at the contents of the bowl and not at your person or the room. It's designed to be a health detective, but you can bet that the thought of a camera nestled right next to your private parts (capturing your private moments, no less) is likely to set off some debates.
At its MSRP, the Dekoda is probably too rich for the average household, unless it eventually obtains HSA/FSA reimbursement. Still, what could hurt the product even more is that it'll live behind a dreaded subscription model, ranging from $70 to $156 annually. Also, cleaning the thing would be an absolute peach.
