Brazil Grapples With Crisis Only 6% of Americans Notice

Most Americans struggle with digestive issues, but very few actually track them. A 2024 survey found that while most people now track at least one health metric, only 6% said they track their bowel habits. This creates a major gap in health data, according to a new report.

Research suggests that 61% of U.S. adults experience at least one gastrointestinal symptom every week, including constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas, or heartburn. Data from the American Gastroenterological Association shows that nearly 40% of Americans say bowel symptoms have disrupted their normal daily activities within the past year.

Despite how common these issues are, people rarely keep records of them. One of the most information-rich daily health habits is also one of the least documented.

Changes in bowel movements can reflect diet, hydration, stress levels, and broader digestive health. A single unusual day usually does not mean much, but a gradual shift over several months may be important. Gradual changes are exactly the ones people are least likely to notice without objective information over time.

Medicine has always relied on long-term data rather than single measurements. Blood pressure is measured over time. Cholesterol is tracked across years. Blood sugar is monitored over weeks and months. The same principle applies to digestive health. Doctors know that one bowel movement offers only a snapshot. Weeks or months of information create a much more complete picture.

Humans are not especially reliable historians of everyday behaviors. Research has shown that symptom recall is often inaccurate. Memory alone often fails to capture changes over extended periods. This limitation is called recall bias. The brain naturally remembers unusual events or one-off occurrences while forgetting routine ones. This makes it difficult to estimate how often something happened or exactly when it changed.

Kohler Health is reimagining the bathroom as a place to better understand health through passive and automatic data collection. The product, called Dekoda, is designed to fit discreetly onto the toilet. It works in the background to track bathroom patterns over time and delivers personalized insights through the Kohler Health App.

Users can review long-term trends that would otherwise be impossible to reconstruct. Dekoda tracks several everyday health signals, including hydration status and bowel movement patterns such as frequency and consistency. It can also detect the presence of blood, providing another important health data point that may warrant discussion with a healthcare provider.

Viewed individually, these measurements may not tell the whole story. But together and over weeks and months, they can reveal meaningful patterns that help people better understand their digestive health. This can help people make informed decisions about their overall wellbeing, make relevant lifestyle changes as needed, and have more thoughtful conversations with their healthcare providers.

As wearable technology transformed how people understand sleep, activity, and heart health, Kohler Health is applying that same approach to one of the few areas of health that has remained largely invisible. Closing the bathroom data gap will not answer every health question, but it can help ensure one of the body’s most consistent sources of information is no longer overlooked.