Forget AI coming for your brain. How about your toilet? – Business Insider Today (newsletter)
▻https://l.businessinsider.com/s/vb/9e_WrPzdZsEJ3fVwkxlwwaBuOb8BVeSffUNV9YsFCXwc6AsWlmM8YlqCfyAvYOsYlkMyoj0LLL0QIQgwxHUEzJ_Ct7iER3nnbec3mgSRjV8cOufhN1zPan6YkN4AW4LIsyxecvVrdOrRU7zjnTZW2A8d_OSqF_HAv36XKQ/961wqJuMvCEVX9HHmBm4riXg4OtMkzu2/23
Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Last week, the startup Throne Science raised $10 million from investors betting that the toilet could become the next frontier of health tracking.
The company, cofounded by a WHOOP cofounder who has ulcerative colitis, has a downward-facing camera that clips onto the bowl, analyzes stool consistency and urine color, and compiles the data in an app.
Users can then get advice on improving their results from an “AI gut health coach.”
Scott Hickle, Throne’s CEO, shared his own dashboard with me over a video call, pointing to a stretch in early January, when his bowel habits became more erratic — around the time he returned to work after Christmas to prepare Throne’s launch.
“Our whole thing is, let’s establish your baseline and then notice any significant deviations,” Hickle said.
Throne isn’t alone. In the last 18 months, toilet tech has shifted from heated seats and bidets into something else entirely: passive health monitoring. TOTO launched Stool Scan in Japan; Vivoo’s Smart Toilet uses light waves to analyze urine for hydration levels; and Kohler’s Dekoda, a clip-on camera, screens stool for blood.
The idea has appeal to gastroenterologists. Patients are notoriously bad at remembering their bowel movements. An objective record could help doctors diagnose and treat digestive disorders.
But “the hype is a little bit beyond the science at the moment,” Kyle Staller, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told me. While stool consistency and bowel frequency can be useful details, he said, they’re not perfect proxies for overall gut health.
Stress, sleep, medications, travel, hormones, infections, and diet can all influence bowel habits. Even if AI can record what’s happening in the toilet, interpreting the cause remains a much harder problem.