Weight Loss Goes Digital
Financial incentives abound, including those put on the table by the U.S. federal government, but the clamor to put our health and well-being into the hands of CPUs, Wi-Fi antennas and software just has not seemed to happen. Thankfully, though, research and development continues.
Developed by Withings, a startup based in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, one solution is a soup-to-nuts demonstration of how digital health can work from patient to device, to software, to network, to the cloud. A digital weight scale is the base unit of the Withings solution, measuring weight and body mass index (BMI) on a suggested daily basis.
All a person has to do is step on a scale each morning, and Withings takes care of the rest.
The scale takes the weight measurement and, via Wi-Fi antenna, delivers the daily data to a user account at Withings. com. The company integrates with a number of online digital health solutions, including Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health-- solutions we’ve looked at in the CRN Test Center and found to be well-built, easily navigable and, on the surface at least, secure. Once the data is entered into Google Health, for example, it can be shared with a physician who can monitor weight control without the need for a patient to come in to the doctor’s office.
Withings has also ported its monitoring, graphing and charting software to Apple’s iPhone and iPad platforms, making it possible for weight, and weekly and monthly charts, to be accessed remotely.
For those who want to share their weight-loss progress with the universe, Withings allows for daily weight measurements to be shared, for example, with all of your followers on a Twitter account. Not everybody is so bold, but among those who are is industry pioneer Robert Metcalfe. The father of the Ethernet, Metcalfe has been sharing his weight-loss goal and progress for the past several months with all those who follow his Twitter account.
Withings shows the promise of digital health technology, and what makes this possible is not so much the scale (which, by the way, is elegantly designed and highly accurate), but the software throughout the entire solution that ties it together. Tasks such as blood pressure management, blood sugar management, exercise and prescription management are mundane. Patients find them, in many cases, difficult to manage. Doctors consider them time- and schedule-intensive. But Withings is a perfect example of how the technology can help fit these tasks to lifestyles.
The scale -- which is bundled with a Withings.com account setup -- is priced at $159, with iPhone and iPad software free. That may be pricier than a traditional, standalone scale, but for a patient with a $10 co-pay, it could pay for itself after 16 doctor’s appointments. For a physician with 10 patients under weight management, this could mean significant time and administration savings by keeping those patients at home. From a business perspective, that’s been the value proposition of digital health which, astonishingly, the market has not yet embraced. From a health perspective, for those under weight management, the value proposition is even easier to see.
The bottom line: For VARs who have health care providers among their customer ranks, Withings should be part of the conversation when the discussion turns to patient relationship management. We like Withings, and believe that if digital health as a market will ever take off, it will need to start with lifestyle technology like this.
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