Kohler Co., the company behind kitchen and bath products, has launched Kohler Health, a venture focused on digital health and wellness. Its inaugural product is a smart toilet device, dubbed the Dekoda.
Every day, valuable insights are literally being flushed down the toilet, Kohler executives say. By turning the bathroom into a connected, data-informed hub, Kohler Health aims to empower consumers to turn regular routines into proactive health opportunities.
“We built Kohler Health with a clear mission: to make the bathroom the center of health and wellness,” Kash Kapadia, CEO of Kohler Health, said in a press release. “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.”
The device attaches to the side of the toilet rim. Powered by optical spectroscopy sensors and AI, the Dekoda gives users insights into their hydration, gut health and bloody stool. The data flows to users’ accounts in the Kohler Health app and is end-to-end encrypted. The Dekoda is not an FDA-approved device and therefore cannot give medical advice.
“Dekoda was designed with scientific rigor and cutting-edge technology to offer health and wellness insights that are passive, precise, and profoundly personal,” Nora Tophof, executive director & head of business at Kohler Health, said in a press release. “It represents an entirely new category in digital health.”
Because the Dekoda uses AI, it can establish personal baselines and track trends over time. With a tagging feature, users can also create a log of lifestyle factors associated with a specific session’s results. Through this, consumers can learn more about their body and possibly bring the results to their healthcare providers for a broader discussion, Kohler executives said.
Multiple family members can be added to a single device, and a remote that comes with the Dekoda requires fingerprint authentication. Consumers must purchase the Dekoda device, which costs $599, and sign up for a membership, which starts at $6.99 a month.
Kohler Health’s head of advanced R&D is Tali Treibitz. She previously led a marine imaging lab at the University of Haifa in Israel, where she developed novel computer vision algorithms and imaging systems for autonomous underwater vehicles. She also founded a marine imaging startup and holds a PhD in electrical engineering. Kohler Health’s advisory board, which contributed to the development of Dekoda, consists of a gastroenterologist and dermatologist at Stanford Medicine.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story stated that Kohler Health's advisory board consists of two gastroenterologists at Stanford Medicine. One of them is a dermatologist.