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World IBD Day 2026 - What 10 Years with Ulcerative Colitis has Taught Me
Throne co-founder John Capodilupo on ten years with ulcerative colitis, and why what happens between appointments needs better data.
Written by
John Capodilupo
Published on
May 19, 2026
Overview
Throne co-founder John Capodilupo on ten years with ulcerative colitis, and why what happens between appointments needs better data.
May 19 is World IBD Day, and I've spent ten of them now living with ulcerative colitis. Reflecting on the last decade, I've come to believe that the experience of living with inflammatory bowel disease is shaped less by the moments you spend in a clinic than by the thousands of days you spend on your own, trying to make sense of what's happening inside you.
I was diagnosed in 2016 with severe pancolitis, where inflammation runs the entire length of the colon. In the years since, I've had multiple hospitalizations, dramatic weight and blood loss, a carousel of medications, and a fecal transplant for a recurrent C. diff infection. I've sat across from some of the best gastroenterologists in the country. I've also sat in a bathroom at 3 a.m. trying to decide whether what I was seeing meant I should call my doctor in the morning or drive to the ER right now.
I'm fortunate that I've never gone through any of this alone. My wife Emily and my parents have been there for every hospitalization, every hard decision, every bad night. I'm extraordinarily lucky in that, and I don't take it for granted. But even with the best people in your corner, there's a part of this disease that lives inside your own body. The body is constantly emitting signals about how the disease is playing out, and we've largely ignored that data stream.
Your body files a report daily
You do your business. You see your data.
Every trip to the bathroom is data waiting to be read. Throne clips onto your toilet and reads every session automatically: stool consistency, frequency, hydration, and regularity, with no manual logging. So when something changes, you're comparing to your real baseline instead of guessing.
The invisible part of the disease
Underneath all of the physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of IBD is a data problem. When I'm in a flare, my GI sees a 20-minute slice of me every few weeks. The lab sees a snapshot. The colonoscopy, when I get one, sees a single morning. Everything else like the different meals I tried, every night I didn't sleep, every stool that told me something was changing, every cramp I dismissed lives only in my head and quickly falls into the background as the days go on. I have a good general sense of how I've been doing, but the details matter, and those are hard to record without arduous effort. The lack of data is, in my opinion, a structural problem: the most informative signals in IBD is what comes out of you every day, and none of it is being measured at the resolution and frequency that is needed.
This is exactly the gap Throne was built to close. By passively capturing stool consistency, frequency, timing regularity, and overall bathroom habits, Throne turns the data your body produces every day into something easily useful. The best part is there is no journaling, no guesswork, no trying to remember what last Tuesday looked like and with this comes not only answers to simple questions, but the ability to seek deeper trends and correlations with your lifestyle and diet to your gut health.
Why I'm building Throne
I spent ten years as the co-founder and CTO of WHOOP, building wearables that turned heart rate, sleep, and recovery into something you could actually act on. The lesson from that decade was simple: when you measure something continuously and passively, so people consistently gather the data without thinking about it, you change what's possible. Athletes who'd trained on feel for their entire careers started seeing patterns they'd been missing. Researchers got datasets that traditional labs couldn't produce.
When my co-founders Scott Hickle and Tim Blumberg pitched me on Throne, I didn't have to think about it. A smart device that passively measures stool and urine, turning a daily routine into an objective record of your gut health and hydration was exactly what I'd been looking for in my own IBD journey.
Throne is not a medical device and is not a substitute for traditional care. Throne is not specifically built for IBD patients, but for everyone who is interested in their gut health and hydration. What it can help with is something complementary to the tools that exist today: give you a continuous, objective record of your gut without the discipline tax of journaling every visit. That lets us surface trends that are easy to miss day-to-day, and through larger studies and more data collection we hope to help researchers ask questions about IBD that have been hard to ask before, because the underlying signal was never collected at this resolution.
World IBD Day 2026
If you've ever wished your body came with a dashboard, if you've ever sat in a doctor’s exam room trying to remember what the last six weeks really looked like, take a look at what we're building. Throne is shipping now. It's a real attempt to close the gap between what your body knows and what you and your doctor can see. Collecting these datasets is just the beginning, and we're excited for the journey ahead as we learn more about how our individual digestive systems respond to our lives, our diets, and our behaviors.
Please consider going to the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundations website to learn more about World IBD day and if you are in a position to, donate.
We have a lot of work left to do. But we're not where we were in 2016, and ten years from now with technologies like Throne our understanding of IBD, gut health, and hydration will be excitingly different.
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