Withings Wi-Fi bathroom scales

When the website has been set up, you can switch to consistent units, and then each time you stand on the scales, data is transmitted to the website. Signing in allows you to see your progress on a chart – and how it compares with your goals – and you can request a weekly e-mail summary of your progress.

You can plot two graphs, and set objectives on the website too
Click for a larger image

There are online tips to help you keep track of your weight, and you can share your data with other people too. It’s also fairly flexible, allowing you to tweak the settings to take account of people with better trained bodies, where the usual BMI figures tend to be less useful.

There’s also the WiScale iPhone application to show off at the gym, and the ability to add or export data, so you can enter all the weights from your diary, if you wish. For the very connected and those to whom ‘too much information’ is an impossibility, the Withings site can even tweet your weight for you, as well as sharing it with Google Health, MS Health Vault, or Training Peaks.

The self-obsessed can view their results on their iPhone

Verdict

Overall, it works pretty well, and – initial setup niggles aside – it’s fairly slick. But it’s also £120, and you can buy scales that will measure just about everything you want for a quarter of that, and then type the numbers into Excel. It’s certainly a hefty premium to pay for automation. However, these are rather stylish bathroom scales, and the on-line aspect may help some, such as amateur boxers, keep their weight in check if the gloves get in the way of recording it manually. ®

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