Kohler's New Toilet Feature Is Taking High-Tech Fixtures To Another Level

Toilets and their features have come a long way from what they used to be — a simple ceramic bowl with a flusher. There are tankless models, heated seats, and eco-friendly Washlet attachments that clean your undersides so you barely have to lift a finger to wipe or dry. But Kohler Health just leveled things up in a way no one saw coming, setting a new standard with its Dekoda, a $599 camera that literally takes a photo of whatever you leave behind in the toilet bowl and analyzes it. After all, your stool can provide important clues about your overall health. So what exactly is the Dekoda looking at?

Well, it's not your bottom, if that's what you're worried about. But the Dekoda is coming into the bathroom with you and looking at your waste. The device clips onto the side of any type of toilet bowl with its downward-facing advanced spectroscopy sensors pointed toward the inside. After you deposit your business, what's left behind is photographed, and the physical attributes of your stool, everything from shape to consistency, are analyzed. It also keeps tabs on how consistent your bathroom visits are. These insights can grade your gut health, detect blood in your stool, and reveal a lot about your hydration levels.

Keeping tabs on gut health is important, especially since your gut does a lot for the body. About 95% of the body's serotonin is produced in the intestine, according to the National Library of Medicine. And serotonin plays a huge role in digestion.

The Dekoda toilet camera comes with a self-clamping clip design that holds tight to the side of your toilet bowl. Once it's set up through the Kohler Health app, with your profile completed and anyone else in your household added (up to six people can be on one device), you'll use the included remote with fingerprint authentication so it knows exactly who's using the bathroom. After you tell your Dekoda you're going to the bathroom, it does its thing with its high-tech sensors. Within one to two minutes, information about your gut health and hydration is uploaded to the app, where it can flag whether changes to your diet or lifestyle might be needed, as Rafael Rexach, head of design at Kohler Ventures, explained to CBS 58 News.

The sensors and the data they collect generate a personalized health score that helps determine your gut health, hydration levels, specific concerns, and whether you're already following healthy habits or need to start. But in addition to the $599 price tag, the Kohler Dekoda also comes with a subscription fee required to use the device with the app. Plans range between $70 and $130 per year. A single membership costs $6.99 per month or $70 per year, and a family membership costs $12.99 monthly or $130 annually. And while privacy is obviously a big deal here, since the Dekoda has access to some pretty private information, Kohler says it uses secure end-to-end encryption so your data stays protected. That sets it apart from the sneaky home device that could be stealing your data.