Throne is an Austin-based health startup. It sells a camera. That clips onto the side of a toilet bowl. It takes pictures of your poop. Currently in beta, the system utilizes artificial intelligence to examine your dookie as a way of determining things like gut health and hydration.
Turns out we have a surprising amount to learn from our logs
Throne calls its underlying technology “artificial gut intelligence.” That AI is “trained by physicians to help you understand what your waste is trying to tell you about your health,” per the company. The doctors are looking for various signs of health found in waste matter, including “nuances” in urine to determine hydration levels.
“We do not access an individual’s data,” Throne adds. “Our team only analyzes anonymized, aggregated data, which means the data can’t be traced back to the original user — to you!”
Few of us expect to get into the toilet camera business. That much can be said about Throne’s founders. CEO Scott Hickle tells TechCrunch that the startup began life as a marketplace for healthcare staffing, only to realize almost immediately that it had entered an already overcrowded field.
If that sounds like you — and you’re able to get past the idea of mounting a camera to your toilet — Throne’s system is up for preorder following a limited beta. The going price for a smart toilet camera is $499, though the company is making it available for $299 if you want to get in on it early.
I mean tbh I've been saying all along this is the kinda shit I want AI to be doing. Let it examine and compare thousands of pictures of my dookie so that the manual dookie-watchers can go out and retrain as artists.
I mean surely, this kind of thing will result in an overall improvement in our society and not just like, warehouses full of marginalized people flipping through millions of dookie pics a day while getting paid piece-work rates well below minimum wage while draining several nuclear reactors worth of power just so that The Company can bill this service as "AI" and some tech bros that made their millions on the dot Com crash and crypto scams can look at their weekly dookie-score and go, "huh, 6.8 this week. Guess I should eat some more grape nuts" (but they actually don't even). Definitely not that.