Just when you thought wellness culture had exhausted every possible way to measure, monitor and monetise the human body, well, guess what? Your s**t is about to get real.

If you’re already sleeping with a ring, consulting a watch, and allowing an app to determine the quality of your sleep, metabolism, and life in general, get ready to conquer a new frontier. Before you go making any rash decisions, like whether to fast for the next 72 hours, an American company has invented a gadget to help you identify the final blind spot in your pursuit of living gloriously through a deep awareness of your body’s inner workings. Business time is about to get very real.

For a mere USD $449, a snazzy new device clips onto your toilet rim and is activated by sensors, triggering optical cameras that capture every glorious moment of your daily ablutions. Before you get concerned about privacy, particularly given that the bathroom is the one place where things tend to remain between you and you alone, the company is keen to stress that the lenses point directly into the bowl “and nowhere else”, a sentence no bathroom company should ever have needed to write.

But it’s what happens after you offload where the magic happens. For another USD $70 a year, using AI’s obvious skills in human bodily functions, an accompanying app analyses hydration, stool frequency, texture, and quantity, transforming what was once a private bodily function into another stream of personal data, which will inevitably have you questioning what you ate and why you haven’t done a deeper dive down the bowl sooner.

Further investigation into this newfound level of self-diagnosis revealed that Japan, where toilet culture has long made the rest of the world look faintly uncivilised, has been onto this for some time. It makes sense in a country where the bathroom experience already involves heated seats, automated lids, 100 variations of cleaning and drying options, angles, and control panels, why not just throw a camera in the mix and make every day a Kodak moment?

There is no doubt that examination of what comes out after what we put in is worthy of research. Changes in urine colour and bowel habits can reveal plenty about hydration and digestive health. And when the usual analysis of such typically requires equal measures of both dexterity and embarrassment, and involves handing specimen containers to strangers, while avoiding eye contact, perhaps this is the privacy we all require to be a little more in tune with our inner workings?  

With the American influencer network seemingly embracing this newfound “research” and sharing their findings, marvelling at the discovery that their “apple juice-hued urine” meant they were dehydrated. Their followers are equally amazed by this revelation. Who would have thought such magical medical advice was lurking literally down the toilet?

For some, this is wellness Nirvana, the final frontier, where all aspects of understanding your daily bodily functions are no longer in your hands.

And for those who prefer to rely on old-fashioned human intuition, I guess we’ll simply continue to look before we flush.