Health tech spent the last decade chasing your wrist. Apple Watch, Oura Ring, WHOOP — all of it bet that the best way to catch a health problem early was to strap a sensor to your body and keep it there. An Austin startup called Throne is betting the opposite: the richest health data you produce every day, you’re already throwing away, and you don’t need to wear anything to capture it.
Throne, co-founded by University of Texas graduate Scott Hickle, makes a device that clips onto an existing toilet bowl. A downward-facing camera and a microphone, paired with AI models trained by physicians, turn each bathroom visit into a health readout. No wearable, no daily ritual to remember. Just a toilet that happens to be paying attention.
“I certainly didn’t think I was going to grow up to build toilet cameras for a living,” Hickle told KXAN.
What the Camera Actually Tracks
The device mounts to the side of the bowl and analyzes what shows up during each visit. Hickle described the core focus as functional gut health — the metrics gastroenterologists care about most, including stool frequency, regularity, and timing.
A microphone adds a second data stream. It converts the sound of urination into a chart of urinary flow rate, including peak flow, a metric urologists use to flag early prostate issues. Building that feature took real engineering effort: Throne’s team built a robot that simulates urination just to calibrate the microphone properly.
Everything gets pushed to a smartphone app, where users can track:
- Stool consistency, frequency, timing, color, size, and buoyancy
- Hydration levels inferred from urine appearance
- Time spent per visit
- Urinary flow metrics tied to prostate health
It’s a level of tracking most people have never logged consistently in their lives — not because they don’t care, but because nobody wants to stand up, turn around, and write it down.
Why Doctors Are Interested
Dr. Chethan Ramprasad, a Harvard Medical School gastroenterologist who advises Throne and later invested in the company, sees the appeal from the clinical side. Patients already track sleep, heart rate, and mood obsessively, he noted — yet gut health, despite carrying enormous diagnostic value, stays almost entirely undocumented because talking about it still feels taboo.
That gap matters in practice. Doctors routinely ask patients to keep bowel or food logs between appointments, and most people quietly abandon the habit within days. A device that captures the data automatically removes the compliance problem entirely.
Throne’s bigger ambition sits even further out: catching colorectal cancer earlier. The disease has become one of the leading causes of cancer death in Americans under 50, according to the Cancer Research Institute. Hickle put the company’s long-term pitch simply — building the smoke detector for colon cancer.
The Privacy Question, Addressed Head-On
Point a camera at a toilet bowl and privacy concerns follow immediately. Hickle said the camera’s field of view stays limited to the bowl itself and never captures images of the user. Throne also says it applies bank-level encryption to user data, and according to reporting on the company’s earlier funding round, images are anonymized before any data reaches researchers.
Whether that reassurance holds up under scrutiny is a separate question from whether the company says it does — but it’s the same tradeoff every ambient health sensor eventually asks users to accept: convenience in exchange for a camera you can’t see running.
Built From 750,000 Test Flushes
Hickle’s path into toilet hardware started with a family connection. Both of his parents are doctors, and when Throne’s co-founder first pitched him the idea, Hickle called his mother — a physician — to sanity-check it. Her response, he recalled, was that she’d stopped giving patients her phone number years earlier because they kept texting her photos of their stool.
To train the underlying AI, Throne asked friends to install prototype cameras on their own toilets and record real bathroom visits, building a dataset physicians then reviewed and labeled by hand. That unglamorous data-collection process is the actual product here — not the camera hardware, but the physician-labeled dataset behind it.
The company raised $4 million in seed funding in 2025, led by Moxxie Ventures, with backers including former professional cyclist Lance Armstrong, who tested an early prototype himself. Sales opened to consumers in March. The device costs $400 upfront plus a $6 monthly subscription, which Throne says funds the AI models running behind it.
The Bigger Bet: Ambient Sensing Over Wearables
Throne belongs to a broader shift already underway in AI-powered health monitoring, where machine learning increasingly does the work of turning raw biometric signals into decisions a person can act on. Wearables made that shift by demanding a device on your body around the clock. Throne is testing whether the same shift works when the sensor asks nothing of the user at all — no charging, no strap, no habit to build. You just use the bathroom the way you already do.
Hickle’s stated goal is blunt: every toilet in the world running this kind of sensing, accessible the moment someone sets up an account. Whether people are ready to let AI watch that closely is still an open question. But if Throne is right about where the data has been hiding, wearables may not have been chasing the whole picture after all.
Related: CES 2026 Health Tech Trends: Why Wellness Tech Finally Stopped Chasing Data
