Withings Wireless Scale WS-30 chews the fat with your Facebook

Withings has pushed out a new version of its wirelessly-connected scales that tell the internet that you’re obese, streamlining the weighing and sharing process as well as launching a new mobile app. The Withings Wireless Scale WS-30 now turns on and is ready to weigh instantly, automatically differentiates between eight different users, and squirts the resulting data to a cloud-based store that can be viewed in your browser, or on your tablet or phone.

There’s now also special position-control indicators, which help each user get to the right place on the weighing surface, and if you’re out of reach of a WiFi b/g/n network then there’s Bluetooth Smart Ready (4.0) support for direct links to a phone or tablet. They run a new Withings Health Companion app, showing weight results, BMI, and graphed trends over your use of the scale.

Results can, thankfully, be kept private if you’d rather not reveal your tubbiness to the internet at large; alternatively, they can be shared with other individuals, such as doctors or personal trainers. If you’re fully committed to our brave new social world, you can link your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts for instant status updates.

The Withings Wireless Scale WS-30 will go on sale in late September, priced at €119.95 ($150). The cloud service also works with Withings’ other wireless health monitoring devices, throwing in blood pressure tracking and more.



Withings Wireless Scale WS-30 chews the fat with your Facebook is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Stanford researchers make heart implant powered by radio waves, put batteries out of a job

Stanford researchers make heart implant powered by radio waves, put batteries out of a job

Batteries used to be the only way to power implantable gadgets, but additional surgeries are needed to replace the power packs once their juice runs out — a less-than-ideal solution for patients. Recent discoveries, however, have such medgadgets being powered by photons, hip hop and now high-frequency radio waves. Electrical engineers at Stanford built a cardiac device that uses a combination of inductive and radiative transmission of power, at about 1.7 billion cycles per second, to its coiled receiving antenna.

Previous prevailing opinion held that the high frequencies needed for wireless power delivery couldn’t penetrate the human body deep enough, and the lower frequencies that would do the trick require antennas too large to work as implants. That conundrum was solved by getting the high-frequency signals to penetrate deeper using alternating waves of electric and magnetic fields. That allowed a 10x increase in power delivery — up to 50 microwatts to a millimeter radius antenna coil — to an implant five centimeters below the skin. That antenna also was also designed to pull power regardless of its orientation, making it ideal for applications inside always-moving human bodies. Of course, the implant’s really just a proof-of-concept at this stage, but hopefully it won’t be long before battery powered implants go the way of the dodo TouchPad.

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Stanford researchers make heart implant powered by radio waves, put batteries out of a job originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Sep 2012 23:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Amazing Story About a Woman Who Needed to Be Upside Down to Stay Alive [Medical Science]

Discover Magazine has an amazing story about how a woman needed to be carried upside down in order to stay alive. It sounds crazy but it’s real. The reason she had to be held upside down was because her pacemaker had become disconnected from her heart and holding her upside down led the pacemaker to be reconnected. More »

Withings revamps its WiFi bathroom scales, orders you to stop slouching

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Withings has introduced a new set of wireless bathroom scales to spare us sedentary geeks the effort of recording our weekly weigh-ins. The updated set includes Position Control technology, which we assume means it tells you to stand up straight and suck your belly in while it’s sending your details to the internet. All you need is a smartphone or tablet that can use its new Health Companion App. which came out earlier this month. It arrives in Europe at the end of September, and equipping yourself for a war on weight will cost you €120.

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Withings revamps its WiFi bathroom scales, orders you to stop slouching originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Sep 2012 07:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wheelchair Morphs Into Bed, Claims Title of Ultimate Work-From-Home Accessory [Video]

Transferring patients with limited mobility from a wheelchair to a bed could soon be an easier feat if Panasonic perfects this electric care bed it’s been developing. It transforms from a wheelchair to a hospital bed so that patients don’t ever have to actually be moved from one to the other. It’s also an amazing accessory for telecommuters, and finally puts mankind on the road to the future predicted in Pixar’s Wall-E. More »

Solar System Scale: Weigh Yourself on Planets Where Gravity Isn’t So Harsh [Scales]

If you’re feeling guilty about that fifth slice of pie you had after dinner, you might want to consider avoiding scales until you can weigh yourself on this educational aide. It’s designed to teach kids facts about the solar system, but more importantly, the varying effects of gravity on each planet. More »

Stanford Is Building a Body-Cooling Glove That Might Work ‘Better Than Steroids’ for Athletes [Video]

One of the reasons professional athletes illegally use steroids is to help speed up their recovery time after a particularly grueling game or injury, thus making them fresh as spring chickens the next time they compete. But one of the goals of helping the body to recover is lowering core temperture, and Stanford believes that the heat-extracting glove they’re developing is so effective at lowering core body temperture that it might actually be better than steroids in speeding up recovery time. And it’s closer to being a readily available product than you think. More »

What Happens When You Get Struck By Lightning [Video]

The human body simply isn’t built to conduct 300kV of electricity. So when things backfire while you’re fishing in a thunderstorm, and you find yourself doing an impromptu rendition of Powder, here’s what you can expect. More »

Water Powered Nano Rockets Can Safely Explore the Human Body [Science]

The idea of targeting a specific part of the human body with a microscopic rocket carrying a payload of medication has been tossed around for a while. And working nano-sized rockets have already been created, the only problem is that they’re powered by chemicals like hydrogen peroxide which will do more harm than good for a patient. More »

Bluetooth SIG releases certifications for fitness devices aimed at runners and cyclists

Fitness gadgets are great, but you never quite know what you’re going to get when it comes to calorie counts, or a reading of how many miles you’ve run. That could change, though, thanks to a set of standards the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is adopting with regard to fitness devices. These two certifications, which apply to running and cycling gadgets, respectively, affect the way data (e.g., cadence, speed, distance) is transmitted to paired devices like smartphones, sports watches and cycling computers. As far as SIG is concerned, too, more standardization means OEMs will have an easier time bringing new products to market — not that there’s any current shortage of options to choose from.

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Bluetooth SIG releases certifications for fitness devices aimed at runners and cyclists originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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