Combining a sensor-packed handlebar with a traditional smart scale base, the Withings Body Scan calculates details of your body composition few competing products offer, including the amount of muscle and fat in your arms, your legs, and your torso, and tracks these metrics over time in its companion app. Moreover, this advanced smart scale also takes an ECG during your morning weigh-in and measures your electrodermal activity (an indicator of stress levels) while gathering more common metrics such as your body fat percentage and weight. Though unique in its offerings, the Body Scan's $399.95 price is quite a bit higher than any other scale we’ve tested, and its cluttered app makes it hard to find the metrics you care about. The affordable Etekcity HR Smart Fitness Scale ($79.95) accurately measures 14 body composition metrics and tracks them in a well-designed companion app, remaining our Editors' Choice for most buyers.
Design and Features: Holistic Health Insights
Measuring 14.0 by 12.8 by 1.1 inches (LWH), the Withings Body Scan is bulkier than the $299.95 HumeHealth Body Pod (12.7-by-12.7-by-1.1 inches), a similar smart scale with an attached handheld scanner. It's also heavier at 9.7 pounds compared with only 3.4 pounds for the Body Pod.
Withings sent me the black model for review, but the Body Scan is also available in white. The high-strength, tempered glass platform has a reflective sheen. Inside, four weight sensors do most of the calculations and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery promises to keep the scale running for a year on a single charge.
Withings has been making smart scales for years, but the Body Scan is its first model with a handlebar. The sensor-covered bar is attached to the top of the rectangular platform with a thick, retractable cord.
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To take a reading, you step onto the scale as you’d expect, but you also need to grab the handle with both hands and pull it up to waist level. The handle facilitates the scale’s most advanced features. Like the HumeHealth Body Pod, it can break down the amount of fat and muscle contained in each of your arms, legs, and torso individually. The Withings app focuses on changes in fat and muscle in each area over time and groups both arms and both legs together, whereas the Hume app offers individual readings for each arm and leg and makes the data easier to find.
That said, the Withings Body Scan's handle also facilitates a six-lead ECG to detect atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat), a feature not available on the Body Pod. Moreover, the base of the scale offers other unique features, with the ability to calculate an electrodermal activity score and vascular age (an indicator of heart health).
It also offers plenty of features more typical among connected smart scales. Using a common process called bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), the scale detects basal metabolic rate (BMR, the minimum necessary energy needed in an inactive state), body fat mass, body mass index (BMI, a measure of your body weight in relation to your height), body water mass, bone mass, heart rate, muscle mass, and visceral fat (the deeper fat by your organs). The Body Scan measures weight from nine to 440 pounds (five to 200 kilograms), with a listed precision within 0.1 pounds (50 grams).
The Withings Body Scan doesn’t calculate as many BIA-enabled metrics as HumeHealth’s 17, and it lacks some informative ones, like subcutaneous fat (the fat just under your skin). If you’re willing to forgo the body composition readings, the Etekcity HR Smart Fitness Scale hits all of the basics with 14 tracked metrics for hundreds of dollars less than the models with a handle.
During your weigh-in, the Body Scan shows a customizable variety of metrics on its 2.8-inch, high-resolution LCD. It uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to sync your data with its companion Withings app (available for Android and iOS) whether your phone is nearby or not. When not connected to the app, it stores up to 16 weigh-ins until the next time it can sync.
It can automatically recognize up to eight different users and has a number of different modes it can switch between depending on who steps up. Athlete mode tunes its numbers for those who work out frequently. Eyes-Closed mode doesn’t show any numbers on the scale but keeps them stored for when you’re ready to look. Pregnancy mode offers specific health guidance for expecting mothers. Weight-Only mode disables the low-level electric current associated with BIA, so those with pacemakers or other implanted medical devices can safely use the scale.
The competing Body Pod doesn't have Wi-Fi or save any data locally, so if your phone isn’t synced during your morning reading, you’ll lose the data. It also lacks a safe mode to turn off the current of BIA. The Etekcity HR Smart Fitness Scale has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a safe mode.
Like other smart scales, you’ll track the bulk of the data captured by the Withings Body Scan in its compatible app. The free version of the Withings app lets you see all of your data from the scale, while a $9.99 monthly premium version adds daily support and wellness tracking involving activity, nutrition, and sleep logs. For this review, I tested the scale with the free version of the Withings app. For comparison, the HumeHealth Body Pod's companion app also offers a free tier with just your data or a $9.99 monthly premium version with additional lifestyle features.
Setup: A Mostly Smooth Process
To start with the Body Scan, you need to download the Withings app, create an account, and set up your scale. When you create an account, Withings asks for your name, date of birth, assigned sex (man or woman), height, and weight. You can then set up two-factor authentication if you wish. Since I use an Android phone, the app then prompted me to sync to Google's Health Connect platform, but you can skip this step and access the feature at any time via settings.
The Withings app is compatible with a variety of other third-party health tracking apps such as Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, Samsung Health, and Strava.
Next, set the scale on a hard, flat surface and turn it on by holding the power button on the top side next to the USB-C charging port for three seconds. The box includes an optional wall mount for the handle so that you don’t have to reach down for it every time you take a measurement.
Once your scale is in place and powered on, give your phone permission to find nearby devices, and a pin number will show up on the scale’s screen to confirm that you’re connecting to the right device. After a brief update, it will prompt you to enter your Wi-Fi info, and your scale should be up and running. The app will then show you tutorial videos on how to use of all of the features.
You’ll have to view the electrocardiogram tutorial and accept an agreement to activate that function. The first ECG result and your personal information is sent to the company’s medical partner Heartbeat Health for review and approval before the feature is permanently turned on and accessible each time you use the scale. This tutorial also warns you that an ECG cannot detect a heart attack.
The tutorials prompt you to set a goal, with options to lose weight, gain weight, stabilize weight, lose fat mass, and gain muscle mass. After picking one, you can set an amount you want to gain or lose and a time frame to do it.
Otherwise, the tutorials explain some of the advanced features and how to ensure the scale can properly capture data. For an accurate reading, you must center your dry, bare feet on the two halves of the base, grip the handle with your thumbs on top of the upper electrodes, and hold it at your waist with straight arms slightly away from your body.
For segmented body composition details, the scale will have an easier time capturing a reading if you’re naked or only wearing light undergarments as opposed to fully clothed. It did capture this data when I was fully clothed once, but otherwise gave me an error message. It succeeded almost every time once I started weighing-in while only wearing underwear, but even then it failed to get a reading once or twice. I had an easier time getting the body composition feature to work on the HumeHealth Body Pod, which captured data for every weigh-in no matter what I was wearing.
I grew frustrated when the scale's body composition feature wouldn't capture a reading and the display prompted me to check the guidelines, because it took me a while to find the tutorial videos in the app as I'd already closed them out after the initial setup. I would have appreciated a notification or a pop-up in the app to show me how to correct any mistakes I was making or at least to let me watch the tutorial again without digging through menus. The tutorial videos reside in the device settings menu, accessible via the button in the upper-right corner. The icon looks like a watch at a glance, but it’s a watch and a scale.
The Withings App: Robust, But Disorganized
Navigating the Withings app is tedious, as it lacks a dedicated device page and a single spot to see all your collected data. Everything you could want is there, but it might take longer than you'd want to locate it.
The main home page offers a feedback window, educational articles to read, and steps to take to understand the scale better. Scroll down for measurements, leaderboards, and trends. Measurements are broken down into the following categories: body composition, ECG, electrodermal activity, heart rate, height, vascular age, and weight. I’m not sure why height is here, as it’s not actually calculated by the scale itself.
Tapping any of the measurements takes you to a chart graphing your data over time, with views for the last week, month, quarter, or year. You can then scroll down on this page for additional measurements related to the category. BMI and BMR are both listed under weight, for instance, whereas visceral fat, lean mass, and water mass are listed under body composition.
For the most part, the app doesn’t display numbers for these metrics, just trends, but you can tap on any chart to enlarge it and then any data point to find an exact figure. You can also scroll all the way down on any of these pages to switch between numeric values and percentages. For instance, instead of showing your body fat mass in pounds, it will display as a percentage.
Finding any one number takes a bit of guesswork and a lot of tedium. The app has a Measures tab, which I assumed would show all my metrics in one place, but no, it just displays the same aforementioned categories with buttons at the top to break them down by body or heart. The Achieve tab shows your goal and offers programs and activities to help you meet it, with more content locked behind a premium subscription.
Both the Hume and Etekcity apps have similar aspirations of being a lifestyle assistant, but those apps display your data in a more user-friendly way that is easy to find. They also make it much easier to see how your individual metrics compare with a healthy average.
Otherwise, within the app's device settings menu, you can set the different scale modes, customize which metrics appear on the screen during a weigh-in (or let it pick for you by leaving the default Recommended option checked), and add additional Withings devices to your account.
You can access your profile via the face outline in the upper-left corner to edit goals, see health reports, scroll through earned badges, sync to third-party apps, and add other users. Hit the gear icon in the upper-right corner of this page to change your preferred weight units and access account security and notification settings.
The plus icon at the top of the main page does not let you add a new device to your account, as you might expect (as mentioned, you need to visit the device settings menu to do that). Instead, it allows you to log activity, nutrition, or metrics captured from other devices.
Measurements: Mostly Accurate
Once I found all of my numbers in the Withings app, they proved accurate. Body fat and BMI measurements were reliably within a couple of decimal points of the Etekcity and Hume scales. Withings doesn’t format your body composition breakdown like Hume, so I couldn’t compare the numbers directly, but they looked anecdotally correct, and the trends shown over the course of my testing matched my expectations, given my diet and exercise from the night before.
Oddly, the weight readings would fluctuate from one moment to the next. The Body Scan showed a difference when I weighed myself with and without my 6.8-ounce Google Pixel 7a, and depending on my state of dress, which is good, but it also varied by a few tenths of a decimal from one weigh-in to the next, even if the subsequent weigh-in happened moments later without any altered variables.
For comparison, neither the Etekcity nor the Hume scales were sensitive enough to pick up the weight difference when I held my phone, but they both held steady from one reading to the next if I conducted multiple in a short period without changing variables.
Over my week of testing, the overall fluctuation of my weight shown on the Body Scan made sense and matched the Hume scale’s numbers to within a few tenths of a pound. It’s certainly accurate enough to be helpful in tracking changes over time.
Verdict: Novel, But Overpriced
The $399.95 Withings Body Scan goes beyond the basics of a smart scale, using the sensors in its handle to offer unique data on the health of your heart and your body’s composition. With built-in ECG functionality and the ability to both track the fat and muscle of your limbs and torso, and measure your vascular age and electrodermal activity, it’s the most advanced smart scale we’ve tested. It's a decent option if you're willing to pay a premium for holistic health stats, but if you're mostly interested in a detailed body composition breakdown, we more highly recommend the HumeHealth Body Pod, which costs $100 less and has a more intuitively designed app. That said, most people will be well-served by the Etekcity HR Smart Fitness Scale, which nails the basics like BMI, fat, and weight tracking for less than $100, so it remains our Editors’ Choice.
The Withings Body Scan is a smart scale with an attached handheld scanner that delivers advanced health and body composition measurements including ECG readings, but its high price is tough to stomach.
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