Withings is today announcing yet another in its range of class-leading smart scales, Body Comp. The device is pitched as a “complete body assessment scale” which can look at the sort of facets of our bodies normally reserved for clinical settings. That includes weight, muscle mass, fat mass, water percentage, bone mass, BMI and visceral fat counts. You’ll also get information on your standing heart rate and your vascular health (based on PulseWave Velocity), as well as analyzing your nerve health. And, of course, it’s the first Withings product that will be sold to be compatible with Health+, the company’s other new announcement.
Health+ is Withings’ new subscription platform, since recurring revenue is now the one way that most hardware businesses make money these days. It promises to “unlock additional features in the Health Mate app,” offering insights on how to strive for a better body. These include six week habit-forming modules, all of which is contextualized with the data offered by your Withings devices. They will also be offered meal plans and suggested workouts to help them achieve their goals faster. (Health+ will set you back $79.95 after the first year of use, and is only compatible so far with this and any future Withings' products.)
Now, this is actually a different product to Body Scan, the scale that Withings announced back in January which came with its own electrode handle. That, much like other high-end body composition scales, asks you to hold the handle at waist height in order to better read your vital statistics. Armed with the data, it’ll tell you the fat and water ratios in your arms, legs and torso, as well as monitoring your nerve activity. That product hasn’t actually hit stores yet, but it’s already clear that Body Comp will offer the bulk of the same features with a little less fine grain data.
There is now a significant number of devices that have Withings and Body in the name and you’d be forgiven for struggling to keep them all straight in your head. The existing flagship is the Body Cardio, which has all of the current bells and whistles, including weight, BMI, body composition, heart rate and vascular age. Below that, the Body+ offers weight, BMI and body comp, while the vanilla Body just offers weight and BMI.
Nike wants to make fitness apps accessible to more people with disabilities. The athletics gear maker has introduced adaptive workouts to the Nike Training Club app (available for Android and iOS) that you can perform whether or not you have a disability. The seven classes in this set target a wide range of movement and equipment, ranging from upper-body strength training with dumbbells to yoga.
A Nike athlete with limb loss, Amy Bream, leads all the classes. You'll also find guidance from an adaptive training-focused physical therapist. Training Club already offers an exercise program for expecting and recent mothers.
The company isn't alone in making these apps more accessible. Apple added Fitness+ workouts for pregnant people and seniors last year and has Apple Watch wheelchair workout tracking, for instance. Still, Nike's move is an important step that could bring exercise apps to a wider audience.
Maybe the pandemic made you rethink your gym membership, or maybe you just don’t like working out in the presence of other people. Thankfully, there’s a slew of gadgets and connected equipment that can help you exercise well at home. Without proper form guidance, though, you risk using the wrong muscles for some actions or worse, you could end up hurting yourself. That’s why more recent devices like the Tempo Move or the Peloton Guide purport to watch while you exercise and teach you better form. A new smart mirror launching today promises to offer “real-time feedback through form correction as well as pacing, timing and movement feedback” through its “Motion Engine technology.” The company is called Fiture (future of fitness, get it?) and the $1,495 interactive mirror is just the beginning of its offerings.
Like the NordicTrack Vault Complete and the Lululemon-owned Mirror, the Fiture has a screen embedded inside a reflective surface. In fact, the Fiture and the Mirror both have a 43-inch display, though the former stands 12 inches taller at 68 inches. It’s also slightly wider and thicker than Lululemon’s gadget, yet surprisingly weighs 10 pounds less. At just 60 pounds, Fiture's offering was easy enough for me to lift and move over short distances (but that’s just me flexing).
At a recent demo event, I tried out some workouts on the Fiture mirror. About 200 to 400 workouts will be available at launch, with sessions ranging from 5 to 60 minutes in length. They span categories like strength, HIIT, yoga, boxing, pilates, barre, cardio sculpt and stretching for cooldowns. You’ll need to pay a $39 monthly fee to use the device and these classes, which is similar to what Lululemon and Peloton charge with their hardware. Though Peloton allows for up to 20 user profiles, Lululemon only supports up to six, and requires a “one-year minimum commitment.” Meanwhile, Fiture lets you have up to seven users on one membership and you can subscribe month-to-month.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
My personal gripes about buying hardware with mandatory subscriptions aside, I can understand charging a recurring fee for services that push out new content all the time, and Fiture said it will be adding new videos every week and that live classes are in the works.
I’m more intrigued by the ability to customize workouts. Through the companion app, you can select one of three preset durations (5, 10 or 15 minutes), the type of activity (HIIT or Strength) and the difficulty level. The system generates a set of moves, like squats, hip hinges, lunges, presses or raises — all of which you can edit by tweaking the duration of each set or number of reps. You can also add any number of exercises from Fiture’s extensive library of movements, and when you’re done, stream your custom class to the mirror.
The custom workouts won’t have a trainer walking you through the entire session like the pre-recorded ones, but I love the idea of being able to create my own targeted sets or supersets. More importantly, the device will still count your reps and monitor your form while you do those.
This is the highlight of the Fiture system. It has an onboard camera on the bottom third, and it blends so well into the looking glass that I can only see the sensor at extreme angles. The company includes a cap that magnetically attaches to the mirror so you can cover up the camera when not in use. Using 4K video captured from the camera and its “Motion Engine” algorithms, the device not only counts your reps, but it can also judge your pace. According to Fiture, if you’re flying through your reps, you should consider using heavier weights. If you’re moving too slowly through a motion, you should try something lighter.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
At the demo, I did about a dozen upright rows, front and lateral raises with a pair of 8-pound barbells (which is lighter than my usual 10 to 15 pounds). In the beginning of the set, I sped through the reps, and my pace was reflected onscreen, at about eye level. I slowed down a little, and hit what Fiture deemed to be the optimal pace. Reps performed at that speed notched a higher score, but every move contributed to my total for the workout.
I tried another session that involved an Arnold overhead press and noticed that some of my reps weren’t being counted. Helpfully, a diagram popped up at the bottom right of the screen, telling me to straighten my arms when overhead. Once I started paying attention to that part of the move, the system started counting my reps again.
Fiture also offers timed sets instead of specific numbers of reps. Another session had me sitting in a chair pose for a minute, and the mirror only started counting the seconds when it determined I had sunk low enough and had my arms raised high enough. When I gave up at about 58 seconds and stood up, it stopped counting.
Fiture
The mirror can also detect exercises performed on the floor, like hip thrusts, planks and mountain climbers. I blazed through about 20 hip thrusts, and Fiture counted every single one. I did struggle with keeping an eye on the onscreen trainer when doing alternate side bird-dogs, but that’s a problem with following any workout video with floorwork.
At the end of every workout, you’ll see a summary of calories burned, time spent and also your position on the app’s leaderboard. Fiture will also suggest a follow-up video that’s usually stretching for a cooldown. You can raise your hand and hold it up for a few seconds to automatically start the recommended activity, which is pretty convenient. I tried this out a few times and the camera was quite accurate at noticing when I had my arm up.
Because the Fiture isn’t touch-enabled, you’ll mostly interact with it via the companion app, the onboard volume and power buttons or by gestures. Voice control is coming, the company said, and it’ll offer options for you to pause a workout, for example. At the moment, though, after you launch a video from your phone, the app will become a remote control for the mirror, showing controls for play, pause, volume, skipping sections and fast-forwarding or rewinding in 15-second increments.
I didn’t get to test this out at the demo, but Fiture also comes with a heart rate tracker that you can strap on to see your cardio performance on the screen. You can also connect your own Bluetooth-enabled heart rate or fitness tracker, like the Apple Watch, and see your pulse on the display. For now, Fiture doesn’t offer videos that make use of that information for tailored workouts based on your real-time cardio performance, but the company said it’s looking into that option.
Fiture
Based on my brief time with the Fiture mirror, I have to say the system seems sound — my glutes were sore the next day. In parts of the brightly lit event space, the onscreen video was slightly difficult to see, particularly when sunlight was streaming directly onto the surface. But in pretty much every other part of the indoor space, the display was crisp and easy to read. The background music and trainer’s voice in the workouts were also loud enough to hear.
In the fitness mirror space, Fiture is a fairly elegant option. Though it doesn’t come with equipment like resistance bands or weights (you’ll have to use your own or rely on bodyweight workouts), its motion detection and form guidance are built into the device. That’s different from the Lululemon Mirror, which, outside of live classes, requires additional connected weights to count reps and offer feedback. The Tempo Move also requires you to use its custom color-coded barbells and plates before it can effectively count your reps.
Best of all, for someone like me who lives in a tiny studio, the Fiture’s small footprint is extremely appealing. It’s also one of the best-looking smart mirrors around, and comes in five colors. But before you spend $1,500 on the Fiture mirror, I’d recommend waiting till we can do a bit more testing in the real world to see if it’s worth the big bucks.
To say the pandemic threw off my exercise routine would be an understatement. I was a gym regular who thrived on treadmills and weight machines, and I suddenly had to improvise with pushups and runs. I struggled to maintain a routine, and for a while gave up entirely. How was I going to stay fit at a time when merely ordering dumbbells was a challenge? Late last year, though, I resolved to get back into shape and bought a $599 Echelon Connect Sport exercise bike to use in tandem with an $80-per-year Apple Fitness+ membership. I haven’t regretted it.
The math behind my decision was simple: I wanted a quality bike that wouldn’t tie me to one service or empty my bank account in record fashion. That quickly ruled out Peloton, whose Bike ($1,495 as I write this) and full subscription ($39 per month) were overkill for someone who mainly wanted to shake off some cobwebs. The Connect Sport was appealing precisely because it didn’t chain me to anything; I could put my phone on the built-in stand and use a lower-priced service like Fitness+ to guide my workouts. I was poised to save hundreds of dollars per year, even if I had to buy the virtually mandatory Apple Watch. (I already own a Series 5.) An iPhone is also required, of course.
Yes, the Connect Sport amounts to a Peloton Bike doppelgänger without the screen, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Echelon’s machine feels solidly built, and it’s stable even in the midst of an intense workout. The flywheel-based mechanism is also remarkably quiet. Apart from a clacking sound that disappeared after the first three weeks, the loudest noise I’ve heard was my own breathing. The handlebars and seating are highly adjustable, and the pedals use cages to keep your feet in place (thus letting you use ordinary shoes) instead of clips. This is a bike that’s easy to live with, letting me concentrate on the task at hand rather than my equipment.
Jon Fingas/Engadget
The quirks mostly stem from the inherent nature of full-size spin bikes like this. The Connect Sport isn’t as compact as some alternatives, particularly folding models like Echelon’s own Flex Ultra. At 92 pounds, it’s also too heavy to casually move between rooms. And while you don’t need electricity unless you intend to use the built-in Bluetooth telemetry, the included power cord isn’t lengthy. I wouldn’t choose this bike if I was a space-conscious apartment dweller.
I’m happy with its Apple Fitness+ performance, though. To start a cycling workout, I just need to put my iPhone on the stand, launch the Fitness app and go. The exercise data I care about (heart rate, calories burned, duration) comes from the Apple Watch, so I don’t even need the Connect Sport’s Bluetooth functionality. I would only want to plug the bike into power if I craved the Echelon Fit app’s cadence and resistance info, which aren’t necessary with Apple’s service. Just be prepared to buy a tablet if you plan to use Echelon’s app (in its open-ended “free ride” mode) and Fitness+ at the same time, as you can’t juggle both on one screen.
Fitness+ works about as well as it did when Engadget tried it on launch, but that’s plenty for someone getting back into shape on the Connect Sport. Apple’s cycling coaches are friendly, helpful and accommodate a wide range of ability levels. Instead of demanding precise cadence and resistance ranges like you might see with some services, they frequently ask you to match a song’s beat or tweak the resistance to feel enough leg strain. That may be too fuzzy if you’re eager for consistent numbers, but for me it’s perfect: I’m measuring progress in terms of how well I can sustain an all-out push, not how closely I mimic someone else’s settings. The bike’s resistance knob is easy to adjust, so it’s trivial to ramp up the difficulty if a ride is too much of a cakewalk.
Jon Fingas/Engadget
I’ve found Apple’s cycling workouts challenging enough as someone relatively new to spin bikes while still well-acquainted with structured exercise. For one, there’s a healthy variety of classes now that Fitness+ has been available for over a year. Many of them rely on a familiar hill climb metaphor that alternates between intense pushes and easy recoveries, but I’ve sometimes encountered welcome twists, like rides that get progressively harder without significant breaks. While these classes likely wouldn’t push a pro athlete or dedicated amateur to their limits, they’ve gracefully scaled with me as my abilities improved.
More importantly, the sessions are engaging. I find myself picking workouts based on well-chosen music with some surprisingly deep cuts. Ever rally to nostalgia-inducing late ‘90s dance tracks, or a coach’s favorite heavy metal band? I have. And while the inspirational talk is borderline cliché, the personalities often shine through and help me look forward to classes from my favorite instructors. I just wish there were more episodes suiting my exact music tastes. It’s no fun to “settle” for a rock workout when I really hoped for dance, no matter how thrash-worthy that rock might be.
Jon Fingas/Engadget
As a result, the combination of a Connect Sport with Fitness+ works very well for me. Exercise is a pleasure I look forward to, and I’ve seen tangible improvements to my leg power and even my posture. I wouldn’t recommend the pairing to everyone, though. As you might have guessed, Fitness+ is a no-go if you’re either an Android user or seriously considering a switch. You’re thoroughly locked into Apple’s ecosystem if you sign up between the iPhone, Apple Watch and subscription. I would also pass if I were a pro or serious amateur racer — you just won’t get the detailed stats needed for targeted improvements. Spring for a dedicated sports watch and a more demanding membership instead.
If you do live in Apple’s universe and aren’t competing for glory, though, this duo is easy to recommend. It’s an affordable, effective way to cram some cycling into a packed schedule. Moreover, Echelon’s bring-your-own-device strategy offers a convenient escape hatch if you ever want to ditch a service without replacing your bike or rigging an ad hoc solution. For me, the results speak for themselves: I’m in the best shape I’ve been for two years, and I can’t ask for much better than that.
The wearables business is hard, especially if you’re a small startup with a device you could, perhaps uncharitably, call “niche.” Oura, which makes activity-tracking rings worn endorsed by a numberof celebrities, recently released its third-generation model. This new hardware is a technical marvel, packing many of the features that most wrist-worn devices take for granted. But the need to keep the cash rolling in has seen Oura, like Fitbit, Apple, Wahoo and others, pivot to a recurring-revenue model. Oura says that this is key to shift from the idea of buying a device that never changes, to supporting its broader goals of building an evolving fitness ecosystem.
Hardware
Daniel Cooper
Before we get into the specifics of this new Oura ring, let’s take a moment to remember that this device is still a marvel of engineering. Taking the sensors from a smartwatch or fitness tracker and shrinking them into a ring is worthy of enormous praise. For all of its imperfections, it’s amazing to see Oura push the limits of what is capable in such a small form factor. And there’s much more tech crammed in this time around, despite the size and weight remaining the same as the second-generation version. The headline features these new sensors enable include continuous heart-rate tracking, temperature monitoring, blood oxygenation and period prediction.
The sizing process is the same for pretty much every smart ring I’ve ever tried: The company sends you a set of plastic dummy rings you have to wear for a couple of days. Once you’ve determined the correct fit, which is tight and secure around the base of your index finger, but not to the point where it’s uncomfortable, you can order the real thing. This actually was the most stressful part of this review, since I felt that one size was too loose, the other too tight, but I opted for looseness rather than sacrificing a digit to the gods of fitness tracking. Oura says that the index finger is the best place for its ring, but you can stick it elsewhere if you prefer.
Unfortunately, the one thing you can’t do much about is the size of the ring itself which is a bit too big. I’m a big-ish guy with big-ish hands, but it feels a bit too ostentatious on my fingers, enough that people notice and ask me what it is as soon as they spot it. If you have more slender hands, I’m sure you might have a similar issue with folks pointing it out. I suspect that the smart thing to do is visit Parts Of 4 to get some more adornments to balance out the look.
Software
Without a screen, Oura is yoked tightly to the iOS or Android app where all of this data will be displayed. The Oura app is clean and tidy, only giving you the deepest data when you go looking for it. The app breaks down all of the information generated from your finger and compresses it into three scores, which are shown on the homescreen. These are for Readiness, Sleep and Activity, representing how prepared you are to face the day, how well-rested you are and how much exercise you’re doing.
The only other thing you’ll find on the homescreen is a breakdown of your heart rate across the day, showing you where the peaks and troughs are. You’ll also get advice on your ideal bedtime, which is useful when you’re working late nights and need to juggle sleep with getting things done. You’ll also get periodic reminders to move if the app detects you’ve been still for a while, and advice when it’s time for you to wind down for the day.
Go into one of the categories, like Readiness, and you’ll get scores for your recovery index, sleep, as well as your HRV balance, body temperature and resting heart rate. You can also see that my figures dropped quite substantially during a three-day period when I got food poisoning from a New Year’s Eve takeaway meal. During that period, I was given plenty of warnings telling me I wasn’t rested or well enough to do much else – not that I felt like I was gonna go for a run or anything.
As part of Oura’s plan to add extra value to its platform, the company is adding a series of video and audio guides for meditation, breathwork and sleeping. These guides, which are essentially guided meditation audio tracks, can be backed with a white noise option of your choice. You can pick the hum of a train station, the crunch of a forest stroll, the sound of the tide lapping at the land or rainfall, amongst others. These are a thing for people who find those things useful to fall asleep and feel restful but I, personally, do not find them that great.
That said, where Oura differs from its rivals in this space is that it’ll break down your vital signs during your meditation. If you’re wondering how to get better at meditating then you’ll be guided to more appropriate tracks that’ll help prod you toward nirvana.
Oura is working on adding more features to the Ring v3 over the next year, including more content as well as more accurate sleep and period tracking. These will not actually appear as new features so much as they are behind-the-scenes improvements in the underlying systems. Finally, at some point this year, the ring will be able to identify your blood oxygenation (SpO2) while you sleep in order to help detect disorders like sleep apnea.
In use
Daniel Cooper
The best thing about the Oura ring is that, once you’ve worn it a few days, you quickly start to ignore its presence. And while you’re not paying attention, it begins worming its way into every corner of your life, learning your working patterns and getting ready to make helpful suggestions. If you feel like crap in the morning but don’t have the mental wherewithal to comprehend why, you’ll be told as soon as you look at your phone. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing here that other platforms don’t do as well, but this is certainly an elegant implementation of the idea.
Sleep tracking is generally fine, by which I mean it works by tracking movement and therefore can’t tell when you’ve been rudely awoken but haven’t moved. As part of this new pivot, however, Oura is promising that the sleep tracking will soon become vastly more accurate as a consequence of behind-the-scenes changes. This will not be readily visible to users, however, since all you’ll get is a pop-up telling you that things just got more accurate. Still, it offers a fairly good indicator for how the night went, although I find the activity tracking to be a little more on the generous side. Yesterday morning, for instance, it told me that my morning shower was a strength training workout with plenty of burned calories for my trouble. Similarly, it’ll tell me around lunchtime that I need to take a half-hour brisk walk to finish my activity for the day, and then by early evening, having done nothing more than stand at my desk, make dinner and put my kids to sleep, it’ll tell me I’ve completed my goal.
One of the features that Oura is tempting its users with is Workout Heart Rate, which I find inadvertently amusing. Because the ring is so chunky, and it has such a hard edge, that I really don’t find it comfortable to wear during workouts. For instance, if I’ve got a pair of free weights, or I’m doing an incline push up on a Smith machine bar, the ring just pushes into the fleshy parts of my hand. For most of the proper “gym” workouts I’ve done, the ring has had to come off, lest I tap out too early or draw blood from the chubby parts of my fingers. But for more ring-friendly jobs, like running, walking, or cycling, you should find this to be a big help.
In terms of vital-signs tracking accuracy, I think it’s always wise to remember that wearables will not be as inch-perfect as a clinical-grade device. But in a number of random spot-tests, the Oura offered the exact same figures as the Apple Watch on my wrist. In fact, Oura’s reputation for accuracy has always been pretty high, and one of the reasons that the company hasn’t released some of these features is to ensure they’re ready to go when they do arrive.
Oura quotes battery life at seven days, although I rarely managed to get past five without having to drop it on the charging plate. Certainly, real-world stamina is a bit far from what the company is saying, but then it’s hardly a deal breaker since you can charge it full in two hours. It’s become common for me to take the ring off while I’m standing at my desk on Monday and Friday mornings and let it re-juice while I’m working.
Economics
The third-generation Oura ring will set you back $299, which gets you the ring in one of four finishes: Silver, Black, Stealth or Gold. In the box, you’ll receive the charging plate and a USB-C cable, and as part of the deal, you’ll get a six-month trial of Oura’s subscription service. Membership, which costs $5.99 a month for new users, will entitle you to “daily health insights,” “personalized recommendations,” as well as more video and audio sessions. Any existing Oura user who upgrades to the new ring will get a lifetime membership thrown in for free.
I want to be fair here and say that I understand why Oura is pivoting to this recurring revenue model. It’s not as if other companies in this space, like Fitbit, aren’t doing the same in the hope of bolstering their bottom lines. And that’s before we get to talk about how much lock-in the Apple Watch gets as a consequence of Fitness+. But I also think there’s a difference between the sort of product that those rivals are offering compared to Oura’s product.
After all, Apple and Fitbit can both offer coaching both on their devices and on bigger screens, which Oura can’t. Not to mention that Oura is really only able to offer guided audio clips (and short videos) through its app. And that while Apple and Fitbit are selling their devices as (having the potential to become) Capital-F Fitness gear, the Oura really isn’t. But, then again, that’s not what Oura is pitching here – it’s for the meditator, the runner, the cyclist, who doesn’t want to strap something beefy to their wrist.
Wrap-Up
Here’s the problem with reviewing Oura: It’s not a device that every fitness person will love. If you want something with more versatility, you’d buy a smartwatch and have done with it. Oura is more of a subtle product, for people who want to be less ostentatious about their health, or simply want something that slips into their lives and does the job. Honestly, since I’m not a gym bro, I really like the data the ring offers me without any fuss or muss.
As for the subscription, it’s likely that Oura will have to keep squeezing as many new features and insights as possible out of this new hardware. Between that, and vastly improving its currently slender content library, it’s worth it if you’re a paid-up member of the Oura family. But, and this is more a comment on the industry as a whole rather than a slight against Oura itself, I do find this need for every company to squeeze some rental income out of their users to be a little bit grating.
Apple isn't slowing down when it comes to new features for Fitness+. It announced several more that will be added on January 10th, including Time to Run. That's a spin on the Time to Walk experience, in which celebrity guests provide narration and a playlist to accompany walks.
The aim of Time to Run is to help folks "become more consistent and better runners." It taps into some popular running routes from various cities, and features playlists designed to evoke the spirit of those locations and match the intensity and coaching of each run. The first three episodes that drop on Monday are based on London, Brooklyn and Miami Beach. A new episode will debut each week.
Rather than celebrity guests, familiar Fitness+ trainers will lead Time to Run sessions. On your Apple Watch, you'll be able to see photos taken by the trainer along their route. You can view these images in the workout summary and save them to your photo library. For those who use a wheelchair, the feature will be renamed Time to Run or Push, and they'll be able to select either a run or an Outdoor Push Running Pace workout.
Apple told Engadget that Time to Run episodes each last around 30 or 60 minutes, which is longer than the typical Time to Walk runtime of 25 to 40 minutes. Other fitness apps offer audio-guided running features, such as Aaptiv, Nike+Run Club and Runtastic. Apple isn't exactly breaking new ground here, but Fitness+ users will have another option for working up a sweat.
Apple
Also on January 10th, Apple will roll out Collections. It's a curated series of workouts and guided meditations pulled from the Fitness+ library. The feature will suggest plans to help folks make intentional training choices in the following days and weeks. Six Collections will be available at the outset, including Run Your First 5K, Perfect Your Yoga Balance Poses and Wind Down for a Better Bedtime.
On the same day, the third season of Time to Walk will premiere. The latest batch of guests include Rebel Wilson, Bernice A. King, Chris Meloni and Hasan Minhaj. Episodes will be added on a weekly basis. More Artist Spotlight workouts will be available on Monday too, featuring music from Ed Sheeran, Pharrell Williams, Shakira and an upcoming group named The Beatles.
Back in June 2020, Lululemon got into the flourishing home gym market in the midst of the pandemic by purchasing home fitness startup Mirror for $500 million. Now, Nike has filed a lawsuit against the company over Mirror, accusing it of patent infringement. According to CNBC and The Wall Street Journal, Nike's lawsuit allege that Mirror — a full-size interactive mirror that brings a live fitness instructor into the user's home — and its apps use technologies that it invented and patented.
The sports apparel giant specifically mentioned that it filed a patent application in 1983 for a device that can prompt users to exercise, monitor their heart rate, determine their speed while running and the calories they burned. Nike also has a number of mobile apps for fitness, including the Nike Run Club and Nike Training Club.
Nike sent Lululemon a list of patents it allegedly infringed on back on November 3rd. As you'd expect, the company more known for making yoga pants and other types of gym clothes disagreed with Nike's assessment. A spokesperson told the publications in a statement that the patents "in question are overly broad and invalid." They also said that Lululemon is confident in its position and "look forward to defending it in court."
Mirror operates as a standalone company within Lululemon, putting the workout clothes-maker in direct competition with the likes of Peloton and Tonal. Lululemon CEO Clavin McDonald previously said that the purchase was all about connecting with consumers, because they're bound to spend more the more they engage with the brand. Last month, however, the company halved its sales forecast for the device, calling 2021 "a challenging year for digital fitness."
This isn't the only patent-related legal battle Lululemon is embroiled in. Last year, it filed a patent infringement lawsuit of its own against Peloton, alleging that the design the other company used for a new line of leggings and sports bras infringe on its intellectual property.
Over five years after the release of the Body Cardio (and one flirtation with Nokia), French company Withings has released its far most technologically advanced connected scale yet, the Body Scan. The big change over the last model is the addition of a handle with four stainless steel electrodes that allows it to measure ECG, segmented body composition (fat/water in your arms, legs and torso) and even esoteric things like nerve activity. All of these features will also make it one of the most expensive scales yet when it arrives to market.
Withings says it's the number one US smart scale manufacturer and created the Body Scan "because users are demanding more and more medical and health data and information," Withings CEO Mathieu Letombe told Engadget in French.
Withings
The new scale is certainly designed to deliver that. Though the design and high-strength tempered glass construction are similar to the previous Body Cardio, it's loaded with extra sensors that can tell you more than ever about your body. That includes four weight sensors, 14 ITO (Indium tin oxide) electrodes within the platform and four stainless steel electrodes on the new handle. The battery can now go for a year between charges compared to nine months before and it packs a larger, higher-resolution 3.2-inch LCD color display.
The handle allows safe, low-level electrical signals to pass through your entire body, not just your feet — much as you may have seen on some advanced gym scales. To start with, that enables a new 6-lead ECG that can detect heart arrhythmias via two sets of electrodes on each side of the handle and one within the base of the sale. That compares to a single lead on smartwatches, so the Body Scan can deliver more specific results "that can easily be ready by a cardiologist," said Letombe.
An embedded algorithm can detect heart patterns associated with atrial fibrillation, showing the results on the display or Withings' Health Mate app. Those can be stored to show trends or "shared with medical professionals from the app," according to Withings. "Each time you weigh yourself, the scale can deliver that information, thanks to the new handle."
In terms of your weight, Withings claims the Body Scan is accurate to within 0.1 pounds (50 grams) or double the previous model, but that's just the start of showing your body makeup. It uses multi-frequency bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) to measure whole-body fat and water percentage, visceral fat, muscle and bone mass and extracellular and intracellular water. It can even provide readings for individual body parts, including your torso, arms and legs. All of that allows you to spot things used by health experts and sports professionals like dangerous localized fat or muscle imbalance, Withings said.
Working with a French company called Impeto Medical, Withings also developed a feature to assess nerve activity. It can track sweat gland activity in the feet (sudomotor function) using a small direct current via the electrodes located in the plate. Impaired function in that regard could show signs of degeneration of small nerve fibers, something that can be corrected with regular activity and a healthy diet.
"It's a useful function, because there are a lot of chronic health issues like obesity associated with poor nerve function," Letombe told me. "Impeto creates devices used by neurologists and others doctors that can cost upwards of 10,000 euros, and the Body Scan is a consumer product that, again, does that every time you weigh yourself." At the same time, Withings will be able to collect nerve activity data from millions of users that could be useful for medical research and patient care.
Withings
Along with the scale, Withings is also introducing (yep) a subscription service, with the price yet to be announced. It will "allow users to connect with medical specialists for advice and consultation while providing clinical teams with data in real-time," Withings said. It'll also offer personalized health plans, videos and more covering topics like nutrition, sleep, exercise and stress management to help users with their health goals.
With the Body Scan, Withings will be offering consumers one of the more advanced health, sports and medical home devices out there — at a price. It's expected to cost $300 when it arrives to the US and Europe in the second half of 2022 following FDA clearance, or $100 more than the Body Scan's launch price. That will include three free months of the subscription service, but it's still big chunk of change for a scale.
A lot will depend on whether it delivers on all the promised features with reasonable accuracy and if it receives its FDA clearance in a timely manner. That's not necessarily a given, as it took Withings well over a year to get its ScanWatch cleared by the FDA after it was first released. The company also had issues with its Pulse Wave Velocity (PVW) heart health feature, and pulled it in some regions over regulatory concerns.
Given all that, it's fairly bold on Withings' part to introduce a scale with even more advanced medical and health functionality. "We think that's how we can advance a user's health, not by asking an extra effort, but delivering more targeted information on a product they use every day," said Letombe.
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The fitness tracker isn’t dead, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the people keeping these little devices alive. Smartwatches have all but taken over the mainstream wearable space, but the humble fitness tracker remains an option for those who want a gadget to do one thing right all the time. Despite the headwinds, there are still a bunch of fitness bands out there to choose from. Engadget has tested many of them and picked out the best for most people.
What do fitness trackers do best?
The answer seems simple: Fitness trackers are best at monitoring exercise, be it a 10-minute walk around the block or that half marathon you’ve been diligently training for. Obviously, smartwatches can do that too, but there are some areas where fitness bands have the upper hand: focus, design, battery life and price.
When I say “focus,” I’m alluding to the fact that fitness trackers are made to track activity well; anything else is extra. They often don’t have the bells and whistles that smartwatches do, which could distract from their activity-tracking abilities. They also tend to have fewer sensors and internal components, which keeps them smaller and lighter. Fitness trackers are also a better option for those who just want a less conspicuous device on their wrists all day.
Battery life tends to be better on fitness trackers, too. While most smartwatches last one to two days on a single charge, fitness bands will last five days to one week — and that’s with all-day and all-night use.
When it comes to price, there’s no competition. Most worthwhile smartwatches start at $175 to $200, but you can get a solid fitness tracker starting at $70. Yes, more expensive bands exist (and we recommend a few here), but you’ll find more options under $150 in the fitness tracker space than in the smartwatch space.
When to get a smartwatch instead
If you need a bit more from your wearable, you’ll likely want a smartwatch instead. There are things like on-watch apps, alerts and even more robust fitness features that smartwatches have and fitness trackers don’t. You can use one to control smart home appliances, set timers and reminders, check weather reports and more. Some smartwatches let you choose which apps you want to receive alerts from, and the options go beyond just call and text notifications.
But the extra fitness features are arguably the most important thing to think about when deciding between a fitness tracker and a smartwatch. The latter devices tend to be larger, giving them more space for things like GPS, barometers, onboard music storage and more. While you can find built-in GPS on select fitness trackers, it’s not common.
Engadget picks
Best overall: Fitbit Charge 5
Valentina Palladino / Engadget
Fitbit's Charge 5 has everything most people would want in a fitness tracker. First and foremost, it's not a smartwatch. That means it has a slightly lower profile on the wrist and lasts days on a single charge while tracking activity and sleep. It also has a full-color AMOLED display — a big improvement from the smaller, grayscale screen on last year's Charge 4. That display, along with a thinner design, make Charge 5 feel more premium than its predecessor.
But it also costs $180 — $30 more than the Charge 4 — and that's due in part to the design upgrades but also some additional features. The Charge 5 has EDA sensors for stress tracking and it will eventually support ECG measurements and Daily Readiness Scores (the latter is for only for Premium subscribers). Those are on top of existing features that were carried over from the Charge 4 — most notably, Fitbit Pay support and built-in GPS. The former lets you pay for coffee or groceries with a swipe of your wrist, while the latter helps map outdoor runs, bike rides and other activities. Built-in GPS remains the star of the show here — it's fast and accurate, making the Charge 5 the best option if you want a do-it-all wearable that’s focused on fitness.
A more subtle-looking alternative is the $100 Garmin Vivosmart 4. It’s thinner than the Charge 5 and fits in a bit better with bracelets and other jewelry you might wear regularly. But its attractive design is only part of its appeal — Garmin knows how to track fitness, and the Vivosmart 4 is proof that you don’t need to drop hundreds on one of the company’s fitness watches to get a capable device.
Like the Charge 5, the Vivosmart 4 tracks all-day activity and sleep and has a pulse ox sensor for blood oxygen saturation measurements. It has only connected GPS capabilities, and it has universal music controls that can control the playback of most anything. The band is also waterproof and can track basic swim workouts, plus it also has a battery life of up to seven days. While it’s similar to the Charge 5 in that the Vivosmart 4 works with both Android and iOS devices, it’s a bit more flexible as it syncs with Apple Health (the Charge 5 and other Fitbit devices do not).
If you only have $100 to spare, the Fitbit Inspire 2 is the best option. It strips out all the luxury features from the Charge 5 and keeps only the essentials. You won’t get built-in GPS, Fitbit Pay or Spotify control but you do get excellent activity tracking, automatic workout detection, smartphone alerts and plenty more. As the updated version of the Inspire HR, the Inspire 2 includes a heart rate monitor, which the device uses to keep track of all-day heart rate, active zone minutes, sleep stages and more.
The Inspire HR is thinner than the Charge 5 but it also has interchangeable bands, so you can switch up its style whenever you feel like it. Its design is also swimproof, and it should last up to 10 days on a single charge. Fitbit also recently added Tile-tracking to the Inspire 2, allowing you to find your misplaced band using the Bluetooth locator feature and the Tile mobile app. All of these features make it the best value fitness tracker you can get.
The $60 Samsung Galaxy Fit 2 band is almost like a more affordable Garmin Vivosmart 4. The two trackers share the same skeletal design but the Galaxy Fit looks a bit more utilitarian — you can swap out its bands, though — something you can’t do on Garmin’s device.
We haven’t given the Fit 2 the full review treatment, but Engadget’s Cherlynn Low was impressed with the original Galaxy Fit: the Tizen-based interface is colorful and easy to use, and plenty of people will appreciate its durable, no-nonsense design. It tracks a bunch of workouts as well and even has auto-exercise recognition. That’s on top of its daily activity tracking and sleep monitor, all of which uses the built-in heart rate monitor to collect pulse data throughout the day.
The kicker for the Galaxy Fit 2 is battery life — the tiny tracker can last for up to 15 days on a single charge, and you can even extend it to 21 days if you change some settings. That’s much longer than most competing bands, so even if Samsung isn’t as comprehensive as Garmin or Fitbit is when it comes to fitness data collection and analysis, the Galaxy Fit 2 is a good option for those who want a basic tracker that they can safely forget to charge each night.
All of the previously mentioned fitness trackers are attractive in their own way (bonus points to those that have interchangeable bands), but they share a similar look. There aren’t many alternative designs for these devices anymore. The $70 Withings Move watch is an exception, and one of the most traditionally fashionable fitness trackers you can get. It’s an analog watch with a couple of health monitoring features including step, calorie, distance and sleep tracking, connected GPS, auto-recognition for more than 30 workouts and a water-resistant design. But we really love it for its button-cell battery, which can last up to 18 months before needing a replacement.
If you had the opportunity, would you pay more in order to use an exercise bike less frequently? That is, give or take, the sales pitch for Carol’s at-home spin bike. It’s the anti-Peloton, designed to be used for just 8 minutes and 40 seconds per workout. At the end of its standard program, it even tells you that you can go to the gym if you want to, rather than because you need to. But stealing back all of those hours from the capricious gods of exercise comes at a price: $2,395, plus $12 per month after the first three months. It’s up to you to decide if that eye-watering fee is worth swerving all of those cardio sessions.
Science
Daniel Cooper
Carol leverages the principles of Reduced Exertion, High Intensity Interval Training (REHIIT), a variation on the Tabata method of HIIT. Put simply, you’re asked to exercise at a very high intensity for a very short period of time, rather than a long period of time in a steady state. In this example, Carol says that its standard sub-nine-minute workout gives you the equivalent workout to a 45-minute jog. This involves you going all-out for 20 seconds, but then having the better part of three minutes to recover.
That 20-second frenzy is designed to deplete your body’s stores of glycogen and pushes the heart rate through the roof. The long recovery time is designed to reset your body, enabling you to grind out far more from your muscles than you would in a standard Tabata workout. And studies have shown that, at least in male participants, a six-week REHIIT program can improve their insulin resistance and oxygen consumption.
“One of the things I like about REHIIT is the long length of the recovery periods,” says Stuart Moore, trainer and owner of Wheel Fitness, a specialist cycling practice. “This enables people without a lot of experience to recover properly between bouts of hard work and then go again with another round.” He added that “all interval training can be useful,” but stressed that would-be adopters “should get the important checks with your doctor” before trying this sort of thing. “I’d prefer complete beginners to interval training try something more mild than modified versions of HIIT,” he said, “this could help with developing a base before delving into the more intense exercise later.”
Andrea Speir, co-founder and lead trainer at Speir Pilates, added that the psychological benefits on neophyte exercisers were crucial. “Because it spikes the heart rate and improves VO2 Max, cardiac output and boosts the metabolism [...] without being too strenuous,” she said. “It’s not as daunting to commit to it three-to-five times a week, which is where you really see great results,” she added.
History
Daniel Cooper
It’s not often that a company founder announces that their product exists because of a BBC documentary, but Carol isn’t exactly a standard Silicon Valley story. Co-founder Ulrich Dempfle was a management consultant working with the UK’s National Health Service on behalf of firms like McKinsey and PWC. Part of his role was to look for ways to encourage people to exercise more, despite the fact they would often say they didn’t have enough time to become gym bunnies. It wasn’t until he watched 2012’s The Truth About Exercise that he became a convert to REHIIT.
The documentary was fronted by Dr. Michael Mosely, who is chiefly responsible for making intermittent fasting mainstream in the UK. One of Mosely’s gimmicks has always been to look for more efficient ways to feel healthy, and this was a love letter to REHIIT. Dempfle and his team contacted the academics whose research was featured in order to get a look at their equipment. Dempfle explained that the bikes featured had their intensity controlled by one of the academics while a person exercised on them, and that the price was astronomical. It was here that the idea of building an affordable REHIIT bike was more or less born. In fact, Carol would wind up being featured in a Mosley’s 2018 follow-up documentary, The Truth About Getting Fit, albeit not named because of the BBC’s rules against product placement.
Bike
Daniel Cooper
At first glance, Carol could be mistaken for pretty much any at-home exercise bike. It has a very large, rear-slung flywheel and a beefy drive unit, which houses the system to electronically control the resistance, the secret sauce behind the REHIIT program. A pair of short handles with the customary heart rate-monitoring electrodes sit below the display housing, which holds a 10.1-inch screen. The seat height and distance is adjustable, as well as the height of the handlebars, and there are toe cages and clips on the pedals, for pro cyclists.
After you’ve registered, you can then log in to the bike, which is a process you’ll have to do every time you want to use it. After the first attempt, you can just tap on your initials on a list of stored users, but there’s no way to stay logged in by default. Given how beefy the bike is, and that it’s designed for both at-home and professional use, I feel as if this makes it well-suited to offices and gyms, more so than people’s homes. You could easily see this in the corner of a small business, with staff members getting their 10 minutes each day as they take a break from their work.
Display
Daniel Cooper
When it comes to screens, there are two schools of thought dominating the at-home fitness market. Peloton’s ubiquity means that consumers may soon expect all machines to have a glossy, massive HD display as the default. Companies like Wattbike, Concept2 and others, however, are happy pushing out machines that still leverage old-school LCD head units. (On a personal note, the Polar View offered by the Wattbike PMB is one of the best training tools I’ve ever encountered).
Carol splits this difference by offering a 10.1-inch color touchscreen that offers the same sort of data you’d find on an LCD set, but cleaner and more colorful. The UI flashes an angry red when you hit the high intensity phase, and the visualizations showing your power output are great. A software update, too, came through during my review that has made the UI a lot cleaner and smoother than it was before. And, even better, you can use the display to live stream classes from Peloton’s own app, although you’ll need to subscribe to them separately.
Boot the bike up for the first time and you’ll be greeted by a Lenovo splash screen because Carol’s display is quite literally a Lenovo tablet in a housing. On paper, this is genius: An Android tablet should last longer, is more affordable and should be easier to replace than a custom solution. Plus, you can (and Carol does) leverage Google’s pre-built accessibility features for adjusting screen fonts and voice overs that it would take time and money to copy for little-to-no upside.
Not to mention that, because it is an Android tablet, you can run third-party apps through the Play Store, albeit only ones that have been sanctioned by Carol’s makers. So far, that’s just Peloton, but there’s no technical reason that your favorite fitness, or entertainment, app couldn’t wind up on this screen as well. But, for all of those positives, slamming an Android tablet onto a bike and calling it quits still feels a bit lackluster for a bike costing two thousand four hundred dollars.
In use
Daniel Cooper
Once you’ve answered the medical questionnaire, you have to go through six taster sessions for the bike to gauge your overall fitness level. After that point, you’re free to sample the delights that the bike has to offer, including four different REHIIT workouts. I pretty much stuck to the standard program — the reason anyone would buy a Carol bike — but there are other options available. This includes an Energiser ride, which offers shorter, 10-second sprints, as well as 15-minute or 25 minute Fat Burn program, with 30 or 60 sprints, respectively. You also get the option for a Free Ride, with power controlled by yourself, or an Endurance ride with the resistance slowly ramping up beyond your ability to cope with it.
Once you’ve chosen a program, you’re asked to choose from a series of generic audio options but, again, I was advised by the company’s representatives to stick with the default. (This was probably for the best, because the other options are essentially musak.) In it, a calm voiceover talks about how neanderthal man never jogged, they either walked slowly, or ran like their lives depended on it. At the same time, the on-screen coaching tells you to breathe in for four seconds, hold for a beat, and then exhale over six seconds, which is hard to coordinate if you’re bad at multitasking. All the while you’re asked to cycle at a very low level, never exceeding an output of 20 watts or so.
There’s a countdown timer on screen (and a timeline), so it’s not as if you’re not told when the sprints are about to begin. But the narration treats it more like a surprise, talking about the vista when, suddenly, she tells you that there’s a tiger leaping out at you!, and you have to pedal for your life. The screen turns red three seconds before the sprint begins, letting you spool up as you prepare to go hell for leather to escape your predator. Because the resistance is calibrated to your fitness level, it continues to go up after your initial burst of energy to ensure that you’re nicely wiped out by the end of the sprint. Hell, I found that I was flagging at the 10-second mark, and could never get back to my first output peak no matter what I tried.
You may scoff at the idea that biking for just 20 seconds can wipe you out and make any positive impact on your fitness. You begin to feel your legs go as your body suddenly starts to wuss out, and the final quarter of the sprints have you running on fumes. As effective exercises go, the system makes good upon its promises, and you need that long recovery time to restore any sense of humanity you may have had. The screen will graph your output (and compare it to your output on the second sprint, when you hit it) and let you see how far you’ve dropped between runs. Although the on-screen display’s promise that you won’t sweat is mostly true, it’s not entirely fair for sweaty, sweaty boys like me.
Wrap-up
Daniel Cooper
In the period in which I was using Carol, I think my fitness did improve, as did my mood when I was trying to complete one of these more or less every single day. (The bike repeatedly advises you, as does its representatives, to only do a single sprint session in a 24 hour period and only three times a week to avoid injury.) You certainly start the day feeling more energized, and I can’t complain that this has eaten a big chunk of my day when it hasn’t.
But I’m finding myself hamstrung by the price, especially given the fact that it’s designed to do one job, one fitness program, to the exclusion of most others. Do I want to spend $2,399 plus an additional $12 a month on an appliance I’d use for 30 or 40 minutes a week? Yes, that’s less than you can spend on a Wattbike Atom or Peloton Bike+, but it’s still a lot. In that philistinic sense of knowing the cost of something but not its value, the numbers make my eyes water.
It’s a bike that does one thing, really, and it does it well, but I feel in my gut that I’d have an easier time singing this thing’s praises if its price was just below the $2,000 mark. It’s a weird psychological barrier for sure, and maybe you’re scoffing at my imaginary parsimony. But as much as this thing is designed for a mainstream audience, right now, it’s priced at the level where only enthusiasts can buy it.
