Having a healthy gut is no laughing matter and as someone with IBS, I get frequent reminders of how delicate our digestive system really is. This is probably why a health tech start-up Throne Science has decided that the best way to monitor the status of your food chute is to sell a camera that you mount to your toilet and have AI servers analyse what it sees in the bowl.
We spotted the down and dirty on the Throne, for that’s what’s it obviously called, over at TechCrunch and oh boy, is it an eye-opener. Toilets that analyse the contents of a motion aren’t a new idea but replacing one’s lavatory with a fully specced up ‘smart loo’ isn’t exactly cheap. Throne gets around some of that cost by simply being a camera system that you hook over the rim of the toilet.
It has a Bluetooth transmitter that sends the results to your phone, where the required app then keeps track of everything it observes and the outcome of the analysis performed by Throne Science’s servers.
These computers use AI to correctly determine what the images are showing (so no throwing a rubber ducky down the pan to mess with the data) and based on the shape, size, and structure of one’s stools, it logs how your daily motions are going.
Now, if you’re worried about people’s poop ruining your toilet achievements, then don’t worry—the system only activates if it detects a phone with the app installed and an account set up. And you can forget about privacy concerns, too, as the camera only takes snapshots of your bowels’ ejecta and nothing else, and all data that’s sent to Throne Science is anonymised.
That said, the company only added a privacy and security page to its website “at TechCrunch’s behest,” which isn’t overly confidence-inspiring.
What’s a little more disconcerting for me is that while AI is used to figure out if a poop is a poop, the final, verified images are all “manually review[ed]” by Throne Science’s “team of physicians,” using the Bristol Stool Scale as a means to feed the results back to you in an easily digestible format.
I think I’d prefer to ask my own doctor about such things if I’m honest.
But perhaps that’s a minor price to pay for peace of mind, knowing that someone is constantly tracking your stools, and giving you the lowdown on your gut health, dietary habits, and so on. Speaking of price, the Throne costs $299 if you buy one now, although the company does state that this is a beta version.
What may put you off, other than the mental image of a server filling up with millions of images of poop, is that the app requires a subscription. While free during the beta period of the Throne and you get a further 12 months if you buy one now, once in full production, the Throne’s app will set you back $96 per year.
Or you could just eat healthily and take a good look at your prize logs before you flush. One doesn’t a piece of tech to determine whether you should have eaten that week-old meal you left hiding in the back of the fridge.
