NAPERVILLE, Ill. — Local man Gary Pruett, 51, confirmed Thursday that his $649 smart toilet now knows more about his health than his primary care physician, a gap that widened considerably after the toilet saw him eleven times on Tuesday and the physician last saw him in 2024.
“My toilet knows my hydration, my fiber intake, my urine pH and the fact that I had the shrimp,” said Pruett, standing in the upstairs bathroom his family now refers to as “the clinic.” “My doctor knows my birthday, and only because it’s on the form.”
The toilet, a Lavatronix Sage Pro, keeps a camera and a ring of optical sensors under the rim, scores every visit against the Bristol Stool Chart and pushes the results to an app before Pruett has finished washing his hands. Every morning at 6 a.m. it sends him a “Gut Brief” with a trend line, a weekly ranking against other Sage owners in his ZIP code and, when warranted, a personal best. His doctor, by contrast, sends a bill.
Pruett is an early adopter in a fast-growing category. Kohler began shipping its $599 Dekoda, a camera that clips onto the rim of an existing toilet and analyzes what it sees, in October 2025. Withings sells U-Scan readers that sit inside the bowl and test urine. Doctors, meanwhile, are getting harder to see: a 2025 survey by the staffing firm AMN Healthcare found that the average wait for a physician appointment in 15 large U.S. metro areas was 31 days, and 23.5 days for family medicine. “The toilet has a zero-day wait,” Pruett said. “Sometimes negative. It’s ready before I am.”
Reached through his practice’s patient portal, which promised a reply “within 3–5 business days” and delivered one in nine, Dr. Leonard Asch said he does not see the toilet as a competitor. “It sees him eleven times a day. I get fifteen minutes a year, seven of which belong to the blood pressure cuff,” Asch said. “Of course it knows more. If I sat in his bathroom all day I would know more too, and I would also be arrested.”
Asch noted that the toilet cannot prescribe medication, order labs or examine anything above the waist. “It doesn’t need to,” Pruett countered. “It tells me what’s wrong and then recommends a fiber gummy from a partner brand. That’s basically the whole appointment, except the doctor doesn’t have partner brands.” Asch confirmed that he does have partner brands, but that they are on the pens.
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The Sage Pro is a wellness device and does not diagnose, treat or examine anything it cannot see from where it sits. Doctor availability reflects one 15-minute slot, subject to rescheduling. If something actually feels wrong, a person with a license is still the right call. The toilet agrees, and is logging that you asked.
The relationship has deepened. After a three-day run of what the app labeled “Type 6 Choices,” the toilet sent Pruett a push notification reading “We should talk,” then booked him a follow-up appointment with itself. Last Sunday it pushed a hydration personal-record alert to his lock screen in the middle of his toast at his cousin’s wedding, with confetti and the suggestion that he “find a moment soon.” He found one. It was logged.
Pruett said he has tried to bring the two providers together. In August he printed six months of Gut Briefs, 214 pages in color, and carried them to a telehealth visit, where he held them up to his laptop camera one at a time until the call dropped at the 15-minute mark. “He said it was a lot of data,” Pruett recalled. “The toilet says that about me all the time, but nicely.” He added that the toilet also has a better bedside manner, in that it has never once looked at the clock, sighed or asked him to step on a scale in front of a stranger named Brittany. “It just warms up the seat and listens,” he said. “That’s all I ever wanted from a doctor.”
Privacy researchers have questioned how much of this stays in the bathroom. Last December, after a security researcher noted that Kohler had described the Dekoda as “end-to-end encrypted” even though the company’s servers could decrypt the images, Kohler took the phrase off its website; the product page now cites encryption “at rest and in transit.” Lavatronix says Pruett’s data is encrypted “at rest, in transit and at brunch,” and is shared only with trusted partners, a list of 312 companies that includes his health insurer, his employer’s wellness program and a meal-kit startup that has emailed him 41 times about “gut-forward” recipes.
His insurer, which denied his last colonoscopy twice before approving it on appeal, needed nine seconds to act on a Tuesday reading. “They raised my premium four percent before I flushed,” Pruett said. “Prior authorization takes six weeks. Posterior authorization is instant.”
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“We built a health system where the only provider with open availability is the one you sit on,” said Dr. Priya Raman, who studies care access at the Institute for Obvious Outcomes. “The toilet isn’t smart. It’s just the only thing in American medicine that will see you without a referral.”
Asch said his practice is exploring a pilot program under which patients forward a year of toilet data before their annual physical, giving him “full context” to review during the visit. Asked when, in a 15-minute appointment, he would read twelve months of daily readings, Asch said he planned to have the toilet summarize them.
At press time, the Sage Pro had referred Pruett to a specialist, the Lavatronix Sage Ultra, whose earliest available appointment was in 31 days.
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