This is Technology Bytes, episode 151, for January 25th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week, I made a technology purchase.
I was listening to a podcast in the not-too-distant past, and they were talking about smart devices.
I actually think they were talking about CES and all the different things that had kind of been announced there.
And one of the things they talked about was a smart scale.
Now, I’ve been using a semi-smart scale for the past number of years.
I really don’t know how many, but the only thing it does is takes the weight and then transfers it to the Apple Health app.
There’s no other real smarts in that scale.
And so I was looking at purchasing a smart scale.
I had looked before.
They were kind of expensive.
But one of the people on the podcast was talking about smart scales out of China that are like $30.
So I thought, well, maybe I’ll take a look.
I took a look, and the guy is correct.
There are some smart scales that do a lot of different body measurements that are in the $30 range, $30 to $40.
And when I think back, when I first looked at winning a smart scale, they were very expensive in the $250, maybe even more.
And you can still spend that much money.
I’m not sure exactly what that buys you because I wasn’t interested.
I’m not going to spend that money.
But in my search on Amazon, I saw one scale that said HSA available, or what’s the word I’m thinking?
Anyway, you could purchase the scale with your health savings account.
And I’m like, ah, something to use my money on.
And I have a health savings account.
And so then I went to my health savings account and looked up to see what I could use that money on.
And they had a YThings, or is it a Withings?
I’m not sure how you say that, but the body smart scale.
Now it’s more money.
It’s $129.
So we’re not talking about the $30 range.
It’s actually four times that.
But it seemed like it was a pretty good deal.
Plus, it’s money that I never use.
It’s money that I have in an account.
And so it doesn’t really take anything out of my pocket.
And so I thought, yeah, why not spend that money?
And so I bought a YThings body smart scale.
I haven’t had the scale for all that long.
In fact, I think this morning was my fourth time to weigh on it.
And so I’m still gathering data, still tracking things.
I noticed using my old scale and some magic through the Apple Health that my body mass index was being recorded, but I don’t know how.
And so the new scale does a couple of things.
There’s more data.
So it measures your percent body fat.
It measures your body mass index, your weight of percent of weight that your bones and muscle and stuff, and then your visceral fat.
So there’s some other things that it measures.
It does a heart rate reading.
The challenge there is because I always weigh in the morning and I always work out in the morning.
So the scale may think that I have a weird heart rate problem because my heart rate has not dropped all the way down to my normal resting rate when I get on the scale.
It still can be relatively high.
And so it’s measuring in the, I think somewhere in the 85 to 104, depending on what my exercise was and how much time between the end of my workout and the time I step on the scale.
But it does measure all of these things beyond the weight and it records it to Apple Health.
And so I like that.
I like the additional data.
Again, I don’t have a lot of data yet to see how it works.
And there’s a lot of things that Wythene offers in their app and exercise programs and all that kind of stuff.
But I use Apple Fitness for those things.
So I’m not really interested in that.
But one of the neat things is that the scale has the ability to connect to my Wi-Fi.
The other scale I used was a Bluetooth scale.
So I had to have my phone, had to connect to the Bluetooth.
And then once it connected, then it says, you know, step on the scale and now you can weigh yourself.
But no longer.
Now I just step on the scale when I’m ready to.
And then it measures all the different measurements that it takes.
And then it sends it to Apple Health and it does it all through my Wi-Fi network.
And it’s all on my device, really.
You know, I guess maybe a sniffer could.
Yeah, but who cares how much I weigh?
And so it does all of that in real time.
It’s kind of funny because the scale says, you know, kind of like a good morning.
It doesn’t talk.
It’s all on the display.
But it says, here’s your heart rate.
Here’s the weather today.
Here’s the air quality.
All right.
See you next time.
And so it’s pretty cool.
I like it.
We’ll see how the data goes over time.
Maybe in the future sometime, I will talk about, again, some of the data that it takes and what it has done.
I’m not sure it’s going to impact me all that much, but I do look at it.
And so it’s always interesting to see what percentage of my body is fat, what percentage is not fat.
And I think I need to read up on what the visceral fat is, although I think I understand that that is something that if that goes low, your organs could be in trouble.
But now I’m talking about things I don’t know anything about.
So I really like it.
Looking forward to more.
My wife says to me, what am I going to do?
And I said, do you want an account?
She goes, nope, I don’t want an account.
And I said, then just step on and weigh yourself.
It’ll do that too.
And it’s funny when you read the details of the scale, it talks about all the data that it takes, all of the data available to you.
And then at the bottom, it says, or you can just weigh yourself and it will do that too.
Nice.
You bought a scale that will weigh you.
So I thought that was kind of humorous as well.
So one of the things that I did is I transferred all of my Apple Health data to the scale, or in this case, the WhyThings app, and also let it write all of its data to Apple Health.
That is one of the reasons that I purchased it.
So it’s kind of funny because I had weighed myself once, and then the next morning I got an announcement from the scale that says, congratulations, you received this award for weighing yourself 20 times.
Well, I hadn’t weighed myself 20 times.
I’d only weighed myself once.
So I think it’s the data that it took from Apple Health, but it’s funny because if you look at that data, I’ve weighed myself hundreds of times on that previous scale.
So I’m not sure what’s happening there.
And then it tells me like, oh, congratulations, you’ve reached the first day you’ve ever reached 15,000 steps.
I do 15,000 steps every single day.
I have closed my rings on my Apple device and hit my 15,000 steps, I don’t know, five years in a row every day except for Sunday because, you know, someone needs a day off.
But it’s funny that it does that.
So I’m not sure which data it took and which data it didn’t.
And I’m not using the app anyway to do anything.
This morning it says, congratulations on program day two.
Yeah, I’m not in a program, so I’ve got to figure out what I touched and untouch it.
But all in all, very happy with the device, looking forward to the data, and I’m happy with the purchase.
That is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at meritfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
