Withings Wireless Scale WS-30

Withings WS-30 ScaleI’m obsessed with anything related to quantified self or life logging opportunities, so I finally got around to picking up a Withings Wireless Scale from Amazon a few weeks ago. The Withings scale will wirelessly transfer your weight and BMI to either a smart phone or via wifi to its website.

If you just want to use your smart phone with this, the setup appears to be quite easy. Configuring the scale to connect to my home wireless network, however, was a pain in the ass. Doing so requires using the smart phone app — there is no way to configure the WS-30 through USB.

Getting the smart phone app to recognize the scale and get it to accept my wifi settings took about half an hour of tinkering. Maybe nerds and geeks are the only ones purchasing wifi-equipped scales, because I don’t think non-technical users would have a lot of success with the configuration process.

Once the configuration was finished, however, the scale has performed flawlessly. I step on the scale, am horrified by my weight, and then a few minutes later I can log in to the Withings website and see it recorded their.

One thing to be aware of with Withings is that the company is more than happy to store you data, but if you want to get it out that can be another issue entirely. There is no capability as far as I could tell, for example, to do a simple export or save of data to a CSV file.

Withings does have an API that other applications tie into, however. For now, Withings is offered as a channel on IFTTT.com, and I use a couple recipes there to copy my weight from Withings’ site over to both a Google Calendar and my lifestream site (for example, you can see my most recent weigh-ins here).

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