Your Toilet Knows More About Your Brain Than Your Doctor Does | Scott Hickle, Throne Science

Your wearable tracks your heart rate, sleep, and HRV. Your annual bloodwork gives you 150 biomarkers once a year. But every single day, your body is producing one of the richest, most clinically relevant data streams in existence, and until now, it has been flushed away unexamined.

Scott Hickle grew up watching his father build medical devices on weekends. He studied mechanical engineering, spent a summer at SpaceX, and ultimately found his way into health technology startups in Austin. The idea for Throne started as a joke around a poker table in 2021 when a co-founder pitched smart toilets. It became serious after Scott's mother, a geriatrician, revealed that her elderly patients regularly sent her photos of their bowel movements asking what was wrong. The insight was simple and undeniable: gut health data matters deeply to patients, but no infrastructure existed to capture it passively, continuously, and objectively.

Throne is a clip-on device that sits under the toilet seat, using a downward-facing camera and microphone to analyze the contents of the toilet bowl. It does not capture any images of the user. Instead, it uses AI computer vision and acoustic sensing to extract health signals every time someone uses the bathroom, hands-free and automatically, then delivers insights via push notification roughly two minutes later.

Key Takeaways

• Your Baseline Is the Only Benchmark That Matters: Clinical reference ranges for bowel frequency span a 7x range and are nearly useless for individual health decisions. Throne is built to identify your normal, track when you deviate from it, and help you understand why. Population averages do not protect your health. Your personal data does.
• The Gut Is a Window Into the Brain: With 90% of serotonin produced in the gut and the microbiome directly implicated in cognition, mood, and neurological conditions, gut motility data is not a secondary health signal. It is a direct readout of autonomic tone and nervous system regulation. Ignoring it is not just a missed opportunity; it is a clinical blind spot.
• Continuous Data Changes Outcomes: The difference between a Crohn's flare and a hemorrhoid, between a GLP-1 drug working well and silently damaging the gut lining, between early-stage cancer and terminal cancer, often comes down to whether you have longitudinal data or not. A single gut test is a photograph. Throne is the surveillance footage.‍
• Early Detection Is a Technology Problem: The tools to detect early-stage colorectal and urinary tract cancers already exist. The failure is in delivery: tests require active effort, cost money, and most people never take them. The path to saving lives is making detection automatic, frictionless, and continuous. That is exactly what Throne is building.

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