Bathroom Health OS coordinates a category that touches the most intimate room in the house. The architecture matters. The actors matter more.
This manifesto is the membership condition — the values every BHOS partner, builder, clinician, investor, and institution is expected to uphold and to hold each other to.
Architecture creates the possibility of trust. People — and the commitments they sign — create the actuality of it.
The relationship between a person and their bathroom data is not custodial. People own their data outright — the keys, the copies, the right to revoke access at any time, the right to leave a vendor and take their history with them. "Stewardship" framings, however well-intentioned, recreate the asymmetry we are here to dissolve.
Privacy that depends on terms of service, audits, or vendor goodwill is privacy that can be revoked. BHOS members commit to building systems where the architecture itself enforces the guarantee — through cryptography, on-device computation, federated approaches, and minimal data collection by design. If a single vendor decision could compromise privacy, the design has failed.
The default location for computation is the device, the room, or the home. Cloud and federated approaches are legitimate when they materially serve the person — for capabilities that cannot run locally — and when consent is explicit, granular, and revocable. The burden of proof for moving data off-device sits with the operator, not the user.
Most of what people need to know about their bodies should be available where they live, not where they wait. We commit to building toward a future where prevention, daily monitoring, and early signal happen at home — and where clinicians, researchers, and public institutions are amplified by that shift, not displaced by it. The clinic remains essential; it should be the place you go because something needs it, not the place you go to find out whether anything does.
A bathroom health system that traps users inside one vendor's stack is a worse outcome than the status quo. BHOS members commit to open APIs, open data formats, and the right of users and developers to move between systems. Standards belong to the field — not to whoever ships first.
BHOS exists to make preventive health real for everyone — not to add another tier of optimization for those who already have access. Members commit to designing for the median household, not the wealthiest decile, and to publishing evidence that the work serves health outcomes rather than vanity metrics.
Bathroom Health OS will become a category because the opportunity is real — and the returns will be earned by serving the user, not extracted at their expense. We commit to commercial models that reward founders who build on the principles, return capital to investors who back the long arc, and treat the BHOS coordination layer — including the BHOS Fund — as the mechanism that compounds the field rather than captures it. Capital, channelled correctly, is how prevention finally scales.
Membership in BHOS includes the duty to flag violations — by competitors, by partners, or by oneself. Soft governance only works when members are willing to use it. Disagreement is welcome and expected; silence in the face of breach is not.
Signing the BHOS Manifesto is a public act. Your name — or your organisation — is added to the signatory list below, and you commit to being held accountable to these principles by every other signatory.
If you cannot sign in public, you cannot sign at all. That is the point.
Founders, clinicians, researchers, designers, engineers, investors, advocates.
Startups, labs, corporates, universities, NGOs, funds, public bodies.
Disagreement, edge cases, or compatibility concerns — bring them to us before signing.
The signatory list is opening now. The founding cohort will be published here as commitments are confirmed — individuals first, organisations alongside.
Be among the first to sign →The principles above are values — written at a level meant to outlast specific technologies. They are accompanied by an evolving BHOS Compatibility Reference: the current technical and operational expectations BHOS uses to evaluate whether an implementation upholds the principles in practice.
The reference is allowed to change as the field matures. The principles are not.
Compatibility Reference · in preparation