Kohler Co. launches digital health venture

Kohler Co. has a long history of pushing the limits. Over its 153-year history, the Sheboygan County-based manufacturer of kitchen and bath fixtures has revolutionized the way consumers look at the bathroom, raising the profile of the humble toilet to a thing of style, sophistication and, yes, beauty.

With the October launch of its digital health venture, Kohler Health, the global company is aiming to reimagine the bathroom once again — this time as an untapped source of health data.

“Kohler has built itself on a legacy of design and innovation,” says Kash Kapadia, CEO of Kohler Health. “[Kohler Co.] CEO David Kohler wanted to build on that legacy in a vertical that would take the company in new directions.”

That new direction is decidedly digital and data-driven, which aligns with the growing home health tech industry. At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, “longevity tech” was identified as a megatrend for the year ahead. The American Association of Nurse Practitioners also named remote monitoring via data from wearables and smart devices as a top trend impacting patient care in 2026.

Kohler’s strategic expansion into the emerging digital health space began in 2021 with the hiring of Kapadia as Kohler Health’s founding CEO. His experience includes founding a digital health startup, serving as vice president and general manager of digital health at Stanford Health Care and holding leadership roles at McKinsey & Company.

Kapadia built Kohler Health from the ground up, establishing operations across six international hubs. The venture has grown to more than 100 employees worldwide, with Kohler Health handling everything in-house — from industrial design and manufacturing to the development of its algorithms and software.

In October, Kohler Health launched its inaugural product, Dekoda, a smart toilet attachment that monitors hydration and digestive health. Using optical sensors and principles of spectroscopy — how light interacts with matter — the device analyzes waste to provide personalized health insights.

“This is the same technology that NASA uses to analyze stuff on Mars,” Kapadia says. “To be able to miniaturize it, give it a very specific use case, then to put it in a consumer‑grade product [that’s] useful for people in their daily lives, and then actually bring it to market and, of course, make it work was no mean feat.”

Dekoda tracks hydration with personalized baselines, analyzes stool for digestive health patterns and can detect even small amounts of blood in the bowl using spectroscopy — a unique capability. “That is something that nobody, including startups or established companies, has the ability to do,” Kapadia says.

The company partnered with physicians from Stanford and the University of Michigan, including the president of the American College of Gastroenterology, to ensure clinical validity.

Users start a “session” with a fingerprint scan on the remote or by launching the Kohler Health app. Dekoda’s optical sensors scan the inside of the bowl and the data is securely transmitted to the cloud. Privacy is obviously a top concern when dealing with this kind of intimate information, Kapadia says.

“Data is encrypted at rest and it is encrypted in transit as it gets to the cloud. Our algorithms in the cloud analyze that data. It’s not like we have an army of humans looking at anything. That’s all algorithmic,” says Kapadia, who explains that the algorithm was trained on more than 1.2 million data points collected from 850 households across the country during the development process. (Users can opt out of allowing their data to be used for algorithm training, Kapadia says.)

Results are sent to the user’s profile in the app and can be downloaded or generated as a PDF report that can be shared with a health care provider, if chosen.

Nora Tophof, executive director and head of business at Kohler Health, says Dekoda users range from athletes optimizing performance and individuals managing digestive conditions to busy parents looking for digestive patterns over time. Dekoda was designed to integrate seamlessly into bathroom routines, but Tophof says its real impact shows up in users’ daily habits.

“It changed [user] behavior in terms of making sure that they were hydrated throughout the day, and helped them understand patterns and the difference between how they might feel or act during a weekday when they’re at their desks working versus on the weekend when they’re running after pets and children,” she says.

These early results are informing Kohler Health’s long-term strategy in digital health.

“Our focus will remain the bathroom for the next few years,” Tophof says. “We want to really go deep [to] improve people’s lives without them having to change their routines. We want to frictionlessly and seamlessly add science-based data and health improvements to their lives.”

“This is just the tip of the spear,” Kapadia adds. “There is so much more that we can do in every domain. The people who understand the potential of this are just smitten.”