Spend $5000 to let AI watch me "use the toilet"? Kohler's new product has left Americans speechless.

Forget about your smartwatch. Now, the cheapest and most easily overlooked "waste" in your body may become the most expensive and valuable health data.

Imagine that when you get up and leave the toilet, you find a miniature high-definition AI camera quietly observing all the waste your body excretes in the toilet. Would you choose to open your phone to check the latest health report or call 110 to report this "perverted" AI?

This is not a fantastic science fiction novel but a choice that everyone in reality needs to make.

The global kitchen and bathroom giant Kohler recently officially launched its "AI secret weapon" - Dekoda Smart Toilet. It clamps a camera on the side of the toilet. By means of AI visual analysis of the form of excrement, it can analyze intestinal health and moisture status and detect whether there is blood in the toilet, providing data support for users to develop healthy habits.

Dekoda Source: Kohler official website

The arrival of Dekoda completely blurs the boundary between home and medical care and poses a philosophical question that goes straight to the soul: When the "tentacles" of technology reach out to our most private excrement, do we obtain an unprecedented all-round health warning or completely abandon the last privacy defense line of humanity?

01 Is it okay for an AI camera to be "installed" in the toilet? Is it "perverted"?

"It's an absolute shock."

"If I'm not on the verge of a terminal illness, I think I'll never want to use such a product in my life."

"I just want to ask, if it's installed like this, do I have to manually rinse it every time after using the toilet?"

When I asked my friends around me what their first reaction would be if there was a camera in the toilet, "taking a photo - collecting evidence - calling the police" was everyone's first choice. After I further explained that it was a personal health monitoring device, my friends' focuses of concern began to vary.

Obviously, different from common health detection devices, when an AI camera wants to appear in the toilet, the first thing it challenges is the users' common sense. After all, in any country, the appearance of a camera beside the toilet is often seen in legal news.

Next, what Dekoda tests is undoubtedly human shame, which can be regarded as the last "safety line" for humans between the physical world and the digital world. Whether you are willing to install a camera in the toilet, in other words, whether you are willing to take off your last piece of clothing in front of an AI camera, has almost the same impact on the psychological safety boundary of humans.

After users overcome these two psychological barriers, this product has a chance to come in front of users and start to show its product form and special functions.

Installation location of Dekoda Source: Kohler official website

Different from the common integrated smart toilet concept, Dekoda adopts a modular assembly solution. By adding an AI camera device, an ordinary toilet can also have the function of analyzing and judging excrement, thus diagnosing the user's gastrointestinal health and moisture status.

Dekoda's clamping plate design and the fixed camera facing downward setting, as long as it is installed properly, can, to a certain extent, ensure that the pictures taken by the AI are only of excrement and will not involve other private parts.

According to Kohler, both the pictures taken by Dekoda and the Kohler Health application are end-to-end encrypted to ensure the privacy and security of user data. Moreover, users can also choose to install a fingerprint password lock to remotely control the use of the AI camera.

Dekoda fingerprint password lock Source: Kohler official website

It can be seen that in terms of product design, Kohler obviously knows that it is challenging users' "absolute privacy space". However, whether it can solve the "AI offense" that users feel psychologically is the biggest obstacle for Dekoda on the commercialization path. Whether this "psychological defense war" regarding excrement data can succeed will directly determine whether Dekoda will become an expensive technological freak spurned by the public or have the opportunity to break through the crucial entry point in the future home medical field.

02 Is Dekoda qualified to be an "AI gastroenterology expert"? Not yet.

In addition to the reliability of Dekoda itself, whether the analysis results provided by Dekoda are accurate and effective is also one of the important factors affecting whether users are willing to choose the product.

In conclusion, currently, the main functional device of Dekoda is the camera device "staring" at the inside of the toilet, including the camera and a sensor module.

Dekoda camera module Source: Kohler official website

First of all, it can observe the things in the toilet through the camera and then analyze the user's excrement with the help of AI vision. Dekoda will continuously record the user's excretion frequency, the consistency and shape of excrement, and convert these data into some analysis results to help users develop healthy intestinal habits.

So what is the basis for the judgment? According to the introduction of Kohler Health, the application mainly uses the common Bristol Stool Scale as the standard for intestinal health. An AI model trained by a team of scientists and more than one million data points are used to determine the intestinal health status. Currently, according to the stool status, Dekoda will divide the intestinal health results into three categories: normal, hard stools, and loose stools.

Relevant interface of KohlerHealth for intestinal health analysis Source: Kohler official website

After getting the analysis results, users can know which foods should be avoided and which foods should be eaten more to aid digestion. At the same time, users can understand how exercise will change bowel movements and customize a suitable exercise method for themselves.

In addition, Dekoda will also mark information related to moisture and automatically adjust the light according to the environment in the bathroom to ensure that the collected information is more accurate.

After collecting enough data, Dekoda will use a specially trained algorithm to weigh the proportions of different indicators such as urine concentration and finally get a relatively accurate score to indicate the user's moisture status in the body.

It sounds very high-tech, but when we observe further, we find that finally Dekoda only divides the user's hydration status into two categories: hydrated or dehydrated. This rough classification method also shows from the side that the current research of Dekoda cannot provide precise analysis results.

Relevant interface of Kohler Health for in - body moisture analysis Source: Kohler official website

The Kohler Health application will continuously record different users' physical data, such as urination frequency, and visualize the data.

Moreover, if you have some behaviors that affect the daily hydration effect, such as special diet or exercise, Kohler Health can record these factors and provide some solutions to optimize users' habits, providing users with a more energetic, efficient, and healthy lifestyle.

Of course, Kohler will also keep an eye on your "blood in the stool" situation. Dekoda still uses sensors and spectroscopy technology to analyze the substances in the toilet to look for substances such as blood. If Dekoda finds that there may be bloodstains in the toilet, it will notify the user through the Kohler Health application. Dekoda mainly uses a trained complex algorithm to detect blood in the toilet and then uses spectroscopy to distinguish blood from other red non - blood substances.

From the overall function, the existence of Dekoda indeed focuses on the "excrement" that we usually can't see or don't pay attention to and pays attention to physical abnormalities in advance. After all, under normal circumstances, when we start to pay attention to our digestive function, we often have already felt obvious abnormalities, which belongs to post - defensive treatment. Dekoda makes up for this shortcoming.

However, from the current introduction on the official website, the data analysis and analysis results provided by Dekoda are very simple. Except for some basic analysis and records, almost no more professional and valuable guidance can be seen. Even in the whole introduction, we haven't seen any description of the use effect or professional diagnosis. Therefore, if Dekoda wants to become a "digestion expert" in the toilet, it is far from qualified.

03 The smart toilet is upgraded to do the "most private" data business

Before we reveal the price of Dekoda, let's think about how much you are willing to pay for this product?

199 dollars or 299 dollars?

But no matter what your psychological price is, the selling price of Dekoda should still far exceed the public's expectation. It is priced from $599 and is already on sale in the United States. $599 includes Dekoda itself, a removable magnetic rechargeable battery, a fingerprint password lock, and corresponding wall - mounted remote control brackets and other accessories. Yes, it doesn't include the toilet itself.

Putting aside this sky - high product price, Dekoda also requires users to pay for the Kohler Health application. It offers two forms: a single - person payment package and a family payment package. Even if you choose the most preferential annual package, the average annual application expenditure per person still reaches $26 to $70. It is reported that the cost of the subscription system mainly comes from the continuous inference cost because it is difficult to make the inference of analyzing human excrement free.

KohlerHealth subscription price Source: Kohler official website

Obviously, after paying for the product, Kohler's requirement for long - term payment for the application has annoyed many users. But what they are more worried about is that once they use the APP for a long time, whether their information will be obtained by gastroenterological medical companies and they will be harassed by advertisements for a long time. Some users even proposed that once the information is leaked, whether many medical insurance companies will have sufficient excuses to evade the normal reimbursement process.

Some netizens even mentioned that instead of using this product, they would rather develop good living habits on their own and spend $600 on regular physical examinations.

Netizens commented that the charging price of Dekoda is expensive Source: The Verge

Of course, some users start to worry about hygiene and safety. After all, after adding a complex object to the toilet, many cleaning dead corners will also be brought. "Do we have to manually rinse the toilet after each use?" In the comment section of Kohler's official tweet, we saw that many people highly praised this question.

After you overcome the psychological barriers, product expectations, and even the price barrier, if you want to use Dekoda, you may also have to ask your toilet if it agrees?

Currently, Dekoda only supports white toilet designs and is not compatible with toilets of other colors (it is said that it will affect the analysis results). Dekoda can only be clamped on the toilet rim between 32 mm and 58 mm, and there needs to be at least a 6 - mm gap between the bottom of the seat and the top of the toilet rim.

Moreover, some smart toilets, such as some smart toilets with water flow and lighting functions, are not suitable for this product. It is said that they will interfere with the operation of the device and thus affect the accuracy of the results.

It can be seen that if users want to use Dekoda, they have to ask their sense of shame, their wallets, and their own toilets. It can be said that the usage conditions are very harsh. And, combined with the previous analysis, the results obtained are only simple conclusions such as whether I am short of water today, whether I have defecated, and whether there is blood in the stool. And these records can also be achieved by simply stopping for 3 seconds to observe and then recording them in a relevant defecation APP.

In other words, those three seconds of staring into the toilet are equivalent to $669, over 5000 RMB.

04 Can the toilet technology revolution break through the "last mile" of home medical care?

The toilet is indeed one of the most important household devices at home. A family can live without a bed, a kitchen, or a chair, but it can't do without a toilet. After all, food is the source of human life.

Kohler is not the first player to want to revolutionize the toilet. As early as 2024, an Austrian startup, Throne, had developed a camera that could be clamped on the side of the toilet to photograph excrement.

Source: Throne official website

The company believes that such a product is mainly targeted at the elderly and patients with chronic digestive diseases, such as some patients with ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. It can be seen that in terms of product design concept and usage method, it is basically the same as Dekoda. Currently, after a version upgrade, the selling price of this product is $319. Similarly, the APP also needs to be subscribed to