Why Fit | Wi-Fi Networking News
WiFi-enabled bathroom scale slides into USA, overweight Yanks sluggishly back away | Engadget
My comments on this next step for the home network
When I was young, the typical kind of bathroom scales that were commonly available were of a mechanical type that needed adjustment before anyone could be weighed. As well, a person who didn’t have good eyesight couldn’t easily weigh themselves and had to require someone else to read the weight. There was a trickle of electronic scales but these were very expensive and mainly available through selected mail-order catalog stores rather than the homewares departments of a typical department store.
In the last 20 years, we have seen the arrival of cost-effective electronic bathroom scales that had a large digital display or, in some applications, voice synthesis; didn’t need to be adjusted every time each person weighed in and could allow a person with limited eyesight to weigh themselves. These units are becoming available through most homewares stores and departments.
This bathroom scales is the first unit that does more than the typical bathroom scales can do. It can measure fat mass and body mass index; but works with a Web portal that keeps record of this data for up to 8 members of a household. The data is transmitted to the portal using the WPA-secured Wi-Fi segment of your home network and is kept in a secure manner on the portal. As well, there is a local application available for the Apple iPhone / iPod Touch platform which provides the data in a manner optimised to that handheld device. But the Web dashboard can be visited through a regular Web browser setup.
From what I have seen of this device, there isn’t anything about what is involved in integrating the scales in to a secure wireless network. As far as I am concerned, these are the kind of devices that WPS-Push-Button-Connect is made for. Another thing I would like to see for these scales is an API being available so that one can write software such as integration into various desktop, network and Internet health-records programs.
As well, this has actually been the first kind of personal-health device available on the market that is able to be part of a home network. It could pave the way for more of these networked health-measurement devices to be made available for home-network use.
