How Kohler Health Turns the Bathroom Into Your Most Powerful Health Tool
“How's your digestion?” It's a simple question. It’s about something we all do basically every day. It’s one that comes up often at routine doctor's appointments.
“Could be better,” you might answer without thinking much about it. Then come the follow-up questions: How often are you having bowel movements? Has anything changed over the last few months? Are you experiencing constipation, diarrhea, or bloating? What does a typical week look like?
Suddenly, what seemed like an easy conversation becomes much harder.
Most of us don't actually know the answers. We rely on memory, rough estimates, or whatever happened most recently. Our brains single out unusual occurrences or focus on one-offs. Everyday routines blur together. And even then, we often don’t have the right language to describe what we’re experiencing: Specific descriptions (think: ‘soft,’ ‘hard,’ or even ‘normal’) can mean very different things to different people.
This is all perfectly normal, by the way. Most folks aren’t intentionally ignoring their bodies; it’s simply the best we can do. The problem is that our bathrooms generate valuable health information every day, but very little of it is actually captured.
That creates a significant data gap, leaving us without a consistent record of patterns that could help us better understand our own health story.
Most Americans struggle with digestive concerns — almost no one is tracking it
Research suggests that 61% of U.S. adults experience at least one gastrointestinal symptom every week, whether that's constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas, or heartburn. And data from the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) shows that nearly 40% of Americans say bowel symptoms have disrupted their normal daily activities within the past year.
Yet despite how common these issues are, very few people keep track of them. A 2024 survey found that despite the fact that most Americans now track at least one health metric, only 6% said they track their bowel habits.
One of our most information-rich daily health habits is also one of the least documented.
Changes in bowel movements can reflect everything from diet and hydration to stress levels and broader digestive health. A single “off” day usually isn't meaningful, but a gradual shift that develops over several months may be. Unfortunately, gradual changes are exactly the ones we're least likely to notice.
Without objective information over time, those shifts are easy to dismiss—until they become disruptive.
Health is measured in patterns, not isolated moments
Medicine has always relied on longitudinal data over single data points. Blood pressure is measured over time, instead of one-off readings. Cholesterol is tracked across years, looking for trends across repeated screenings. Blood sugar is monitored over weeks and months to understand long-term glucose balance rather than a single spike or crash.
The same principle applies to digestive health. Doctors know that one bowel movement offers only a snapshot. Weeks or months of information create a much more complete picture.
We even have a name for this limitation: recall bias. Our brains naturally remember unusual events or one-off occurrences, while forgetting routine ones. This makes it incredibly difficult to accurately estimate how often something happened or exactly when it changed.
A new way to understand everyday health
So what if collecting that information didn't require remembering it at all? Kohler Health is reimagining the bathroom as one of the most powerful places to better understand your health. And the process is passive and automatic.
The product is designed to fit discreetly onto the toilet, working in the background to track bathroom patterns over time and delivering personalized insights through the Kohler Health App
There, users can review long-term trends that would otherwise be impossible to reconstruct.
Dekoda tracks several everyday health signals, including hydration status and bowel movement patterns such as frequency and consistency. It can also detect the presence of blood, providing another important health data point that may warrant discussion with a healthcare provider.
Viewed individually, these measurements may not tell the whole story. But together—and over weeks and months—they can reveal meaningful patterns that help people better understand their digestive health.
Perhaps even more importantly, they can help people make informed decisions about their overall wellbeing, make relevant lifestyle changes as needed, and have more thoughtful conversations with their health care providers.
The takeaway
As wearable technology transformed how we understand sleep, activity, and heart health, Kohler Health is applying that same philosophy to one of the few areas of health that has remained largely invisible.
Closing the bathroom data gap won't answer every health question. But it can help ensure one of the body's most consistent sources of information is no longer overlooked.