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What Can Your Toilet Tell About You?
I've tested many gadgets over the years, but none quite like this: I let a camera look inside my toilet bowl to analyze my, er, daily offerings.
The Dekoda, which started shipping on Oct. 21, is laden with sensors for understanding waste. It's the first tech of its kind to become widely available in the U.S. And it won't be the last.
A new wave of hardware like Dekoda captures the data we flush down the drain—and aims to unlock health clues contained within. The soon-to-be-released U-Scan from Withings can measure vitamin levels from urine, while a Toto toilet with an integrated stool scanner became available in August.
What, exactly, is all of this data for? Is it useful, or just creating a new kind of health anxiety? Is an internet-connected toilet camera a privacy nightmare? And how much do I really want to know about what's inside there?
There's a lot of hype around gut health recently—for good reason. People generally don't eat enough fiber, which can trigger inflammation, and researchers are investigating the connection between our digestive systems and rising cancer rates.
I'm a health-conscious person who uses wearables to continuously monitor my vitals. I was drawn to the $599 Dekoda from Kohler Health, a new subsidiary of the kitchen and bath company, because it can track something that a smartwatch can't: urine and stool.
Dekoda clamps to the side of a toilet bowl. Its sensors can determine hydration levels based on the color of urine, the consistency of stool and the presence of hemoglobin, a protein found in blood cells. The battery lasts about a week.
I needed to learn some choreography to log my…logs. When nature calls, I turn on Dekoda by approaching it. Simple enough. Then I scan my fingerprint on a remote mounted next to my porcelain throne, which allows multiple people to authenticate their personal sessions. The remote's screen flashes “You may now use the bathroom” when it's time to go.
Before wiping or flushing, I tap the remote again to tell Dekoda's camera to cut the scene. Dekoda captures images throughout the session—up to five minutes long—shining bright lights intermittently into the bowl. It needs an unobstructed view of the subject to do its best work. Some vitamins, such as folic acid, can discolor urine and lead to inaccurate results. Toilet paper, cleaning solutions, fancy dark toilets, rust and some bidets (including my beloved Toto, which I turned off) can interfere with the analysis.
Dekoda then sends the images over Wi-Fi to Kohler Health's secure servers to evaluate a No. 1 (hydrated or underhydrated?) or No. 2 (regular, hard or loose, based on the medical-standard Bristol stool chart). Yes, there are now pictures of my poop in the cloud.
The paired app, which requires a $7-a-month subscription, delivered the results to my phone. Some of my insights: “Focus on hydration. Pour yourself a glass of water.” “You've been making healthy choices and it shows.” It was more vague when things weren't OK: “Listen to your gut. Your body is trying to tell you something about a change in your gut health.”
Sure, I can look at my own waste to determine whether something is out of whack. Darker pee means I need more fluids. Constipation means I should make lentils for dinner. While its analysis was a little basic, I liked that Dekoda reinforced good habits, like drinking water and eating more vegetables.
“The brain interprets and decodes these signals from the gastrointestinal tract and takes care of it to maintain homeostasis,” Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist and professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, said of generally healthy people. “The trend is that now tech is trying to replace an intrinsic function we have.”
Blood in waste, however, is more serious. He said microscopic amounts of blood in stool can be indicative of a polyp or early cancer.
Like most health metrics, the insights get more interesting over time. My hydration report showed that I tended to be underhydrated on weekends. Kash Kapadia, chief executive of Kohler Health, noted that was common among parents who might be tending to their children's bodily needs more than their own.
My main issue with Dekoda was that the info existed in a silo. Pairing the data with meal logs, for example, would help reveal how my diet—or sleep or activity or menstrual cycle—affects my gut so I can make changes. Plus, excreta is a lagging indicator, so it's doubly difficult to connect the dots.
I felt pretty comfortable on the privacy front, all things considered. The images are encrypted, and personal data is secured in such a way that Kohler can't access it, Kapadia said, noting that fingerprint data is stored locally on the remote.
Dekoda has some good ideas, but it's a first-generation device. My initial prelaunch test unit sent me down a potential medical-emergency spiral, falsely flagging most entries as “blood in bowl.” Kohler sent over another unit, and the readings were far less grim.
I'm not going to be buying a Dekoda. But trying it made me more gut-curious, and if it were integrated into a bidet, I would be more interested. Unfortunately, Toto's Neorest stool-scanning toilets start at around $3,280, and I'd need to live in Japan.
I also have my eye on the Withings U-Scan (starting at $380), a Wi-Fi-connected urine-analyzing micro-lab. The device contains a swappable cartridge that needs to be replaced after about three months. (It comes with gloves and a cleaning station.) One focuses on nutrition and metabolism biomarkers, while another tracks hormone levels during a menstrual cycle. As someone who has used urine-based ovulation strips regularly, I think the latter sounds particularly promising.
The toilet has a lot of potential as a health monitor, says Seung-min Park, who led a Stanford School of Medicine project to develop a smart commode. Officials already look at wastewater to predict Covid outbreaks.
Its greatest advantage is the ability to track data without users having to do anything, said Park, who is currently a chemistry and biotechnology professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
It can capture lots of samples and paint a picture of how your health changes over time. Unlike a wearable, which is easy enough to leave on your nightstand, the loo is something you can't forget to use. That's a vision of the future I can get behind.
Write to Nicole Nguyen at nicole.nguyen@wsj.com
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Source: HindustanTimes
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