Withings WIFI Body Composition Smart Scale

Believe the other five star reviews. All I have to add is that it is pointless to have this scale if all one cares about is why clothes aren't fitting like they used to. Do not get this if you are the type who gets a new gym membership on January 2 and a month later you forgot where the gym is. What the scale is good for, or at least how I rationalized the purchase, is it that it complements a geek's approach to health and fitness. That is, we all know that improving one's health is fairly simple: eat better, get more sleep, drop the carbs, add ninety minutes or more of vigorous activity a week and stay out of the taverns. You don't need this scale or even any scale if all that is of interest is generally better health and clothes fit. Now for those who enjoy body hacking or What Ifs? This scale is awesome. Lets say that you adopt a regime of regular fasting and daily walks. This will burn fat and likely trash your muscles and that result will be reflected in the body composition readings. Dropping carbs? H2O numbers change. Overworking your exercise, your heart patterns will change (though for Reasons, you only get afib notifications but the ECG/EKG graphs are telling if you know how to read them and good at discerning artifacts) Want to know how that fad exercise/diet is working out for you? Now you have personal anecdata to support or refute whatever claims were made. Just took up running, swimming or boxing? See how these new activities integrate with your body shaping. Are the numbers valid? Who knows and how would a consumer know unless they had access to medical grade and certified analogs. I don't think it matters unless your numbers somehow work themselves into conversations, but trends, which this scale and app can provide will give fairly decent feedback to whatever diet/exercise plan you are following. The downside, and it is fairly understandable why, is that this scale does not play well with the Garmin Universe. Garmin has the best tracking watch - the Fenix line, this is indisputable. What Garmin doesn't have is the best peripherals. I was seriously considering upgrading from an ancient Withings smart scale to the Garmin offering because of the integration, but I wanted more toyz and having more dollars than sense opted for this prosumer scale. Thankfully MyFitnessPal is the intermediary between these two health and fitness gadget Goliaths. Because of the robust data collection that Withings is doing, and the plethora of data scientists itching to leverage AI or something to generate marketable data, I can't help but think that broader acceptance of this device would lead to things that Garmin has been doing with their data partners and that is to invent scoring mechanism based on some combination of metrics collected from this scale and integrations from other peripherals (BP and Oxy sensors) along with dietary habits from collaborations with various diet tracking apps. I look forward to what Withings comes up with in the future and I can only encourage them to work with their market competitors and intermediaries so that they can make some Withings brand Health numbers so that metrics based body hackers can game. We are odd ducks, but quite frankly its us who buy these wildly unnecessary devices.