Health is important. It’s one of those aspects of life that we all know we need to be careful about, even while we completely drop the ball time and time again.
Our weight, blood pressure, nutrition, cardio health, sleep and all sorts of other things that go into being healthy are so important to our quality of life and longevity and yet somehow so many of us get distracted by everything else in our lives and let the fundamentals of wellbeing fall by the wayside.
This all became a much more clear and present issue for a friend of mine when he had to drop everything and run to the hospital. Let me start by telling you about him. I’ll call him Tom, since I don’t think he’d appreciate being put on blast for one of my articles! Tom is a bit older than me, a long time professional in the wide world of writing and a very active guy. He’s been a martial arts practitioner for as long as I’ve known him and longer, strong, in shape and anything but a lazy office worker type. I’ve always known him to be the toughest guy in the room. As time has worn on, I guess he had stopped paying as much attention to his eating habits and level of activity as work has weighed on him. He still goes to the fighting gym and puts in the work, but it’s about time for him to slow down a little so it just made sense that he might be taking it a little bit easier. One day he started to feel off. A little funky at first, then worse. Eventually he felt so bad that he decided to get checked out. Turns out his blood pressure was through the roof! I’m not talking a little high, I’m talking 178/110! It was so bad that, had he not caught it when he did, it could have caused any number of really terrible problems from a heart attack to a stroke.
So now he’s doing the regular doctor visit but one of the things he needs to do between visits is watch his stats. He needs to keep track of his blood pressure, sure, but also all sorts of other details like his weight, his heart rate, his bmi and his workout schedule. That’s a whole lot for a guy who’s still working as hard as he is, so I thought it was time to put my product review skills to work and find him something to help!
The Wide World of Health Tech
Turns out there is an awful lot of health tracking tech out there! I was thinking a wearable at first, but really, he’s not the type to walk around with a fit bit, so I kept looking.
I found a crazy list of options. We’ve got health tracking rings like the Oura Ring, arm bands like WHOOP, specialized at-home monitors like BP, glucose, skin health, metabolic health meters, smart watches, lapel AI assistants, On-skin heart rate monitors, phone apps that use the internal gyroscope in your phone to track movement, shoe clip-on step trackers, smart scales and on and on. Holy smokes there are a lot of things out there that claim to track and help improve your health.
I figured a good rule of thumb here is to avoid anything that uses “AI” as it’s big selling point. I think we can all agree that AI isn’t where it needs to be for you to trust it with your health. (Yes, I know that “AI” is in everything tech, but making it a huge selling point makes things feel scammy). So, let’s go back through that list. Wearables aren’t really his style so that takes a lot of the items off the table. He’s not really the type to want a bunch of medical style equipment hooked up to him at the end of each day, so the medical grade glucose/BP/metabolic health monitors are out. That leaves us with our winner, smart scales!
What is a Smart Scale?
This was a new one for me, so I had to do a little reading. Basically, a smart scale is basically a bathroom scale that does more than just tell you how much you weigh. You step on it like normal, but instead of giving you a single number and calling it a day, it tries to break that number down into what your body is actually made of. According to my research, they use something called “bioelectrical impedance.” That’s a little scary sounding, but apparently it’s just sending super small electrical signals into your body through your feet and measuring how those signals move once they’re in there. It’s not exactly perfect, so you need to take each reading with a grain of salt but they are accurate enough to give you a decent picture of your progress over time. The nice thing is that most scales send the data to your phone so you can have a nice interface with which to break it all down for your use.
I’m something of a skeptic when it comes to this type of tech, it all feels like magic to me. I did a good bit of reading before I decided to send one of these to my buddy. Here’s where the review gets a little dry, so buckle up.
According to a review of the technology in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, bioelectrical impedance analysis (They refer to it as “BIA”) is useful for tracking changes in a number of important health indicators over time, but only if done regularly and under similar conditions. Basically, if you get on the scale every morning wearing the same clothes (no shoes or socks) and do that religiously, it can use the results over time to give you a pretty reliable measurement of how your stats are changing.
Ok, the research checks out, let’s go shopping!
The RENPHO MorphoScan Nova Smart Scale
Remember how I mentioned that there are a million different types of health tracking gadgets out there? Well apparently, once you choose a category, it’s the same thing with the number of products competing for your dollar. I scrolled through so many smart scales that the very idea of one started to feel strange to me. Eventually I settled on a very well reviewed scale, the RENPHO MorphoScan Nova Smart Scale. This one had all the features and a well-reviewed companion app, so I hit buy and sent it along to my friend.
After a while I asked him how he liked it. This is an excerpt from his response:
“I’ve been using it pretty much every morning since it showed up. It’s been way more useful than I expected.
I been trying to get my act together after the whole blood pressure freakout, and this has been a great daily check-in. Seeing the weight body fat and muscle numbers change a little here and there keeps me revved up. Like on days where the scale barely moves it gets annoying but I can still usually see something improving and that helps.
The handle thing is a little goofy at first, not gonna lie, but you get used to it. I kind of like that it shows a bunch of stuff right on the screen so I don’t have to grab my phone every time. I still check the app later, mostly just to see if I’m trending in the right direction.”
So overall, seems like a win. The “handle thing” he mentioned is the small, attached handle you hold onto while you stand on the scale that adds more data points to the scan. If you’ve ever used a treadmill or elliptical that had sensors in the handles, same thing.
What Does it Scan?
Here’s a list of some of the metrics it scans for. It says it scans for 50 metrics but let’s stick to the ones generally considered the best and most accurate.
- Weight
- BMI
- Body fat %
- Muscle mass
- Skeletal muscle
- Body water
- Bone mass
- Protein
- Visceral fat
- Metabolic age
Is it Worth It?
This is a little more on the expensive side than some of the other scales I found, coming in at about $189.98 on Amazon. While that’s a lot for a scale, the fact that it reads so much data makes it feel worth it to me. This isn’t your basic bathroom scale so if that’s all you need, this might be overkill. Still, the weight limit is a whopping 400lbs so if you’re really up there and trying your best to get into shape, that weight limit alone might make this one worth it!
For people trying to get healthy, I recommend this one. My buddy is still using it and it seemed pretty easy to get started with.
Author Bio: Ever since a young George was disappointed with a toy that did match up to the advertising, he became a tireless advocate for consumers. He’ll review anything that folks have to spend their hard-earned dollars on. George is grateful that he gets to use his skills as a writer and an artist to help connect with consumers and help them make the best decisions possible.
This article is for informational purposes only and reflects the author’s independent opinion. Readers should verify details directly with the manufacturer or retailer before making a purchase decision.
