Withings: Smart health-tech putting your health back in your hands

“We’ve seen a drastic change in the medical landscape. We see that people have a switch in their relationship with their healthcare professionals.”

Walking down the street, you’ll notice many people have swatched their classic Casio for something a little bit… Smarter. Interest in smart devices and wearable tech has grown rapidly since the pandemic, as our relationship with our health has changed and evolved.

Withings is a company developing some of the most technically advanced health trackers on the market. But it’s not all about smartwatches and fitness straps - Withings’ smart scales are state-of-the-art, and their pioneering urine monitor is one-of-a-kind. In this episode we find out about all three of Withings’ flagship products, visiting their HQ just outside Paris to meet mechanical team leader Manon Navellou and PR manager Thi Nguyen.

We also hear from Jon Hirschtick who explains why Withings has chosen to use PTC’s cloud-based computer aided design platform Onshape.Find out more about Onshape here.

Find out more about Withings here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Katy Lee. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where your health is back in your hands. I’m your host, Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and we meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC technology. 

How has the pandemic changed your relationship with your health? For many of us, it has crystallised the importance of looking after ourselves, pushing us to dig deeper into what’s going on in our bodies, no longer content with waiting until something goes wrong. And thanks to rapid innovations in smart devices and wearable tech, never before have we had such an intimate knowledge of our health. Withings is at the forefront of this revolution, a company pioneering some of the most technically advanced health trackers on the market – and they’re putting our health back in our hands. Their success has even led them to team up with the French government to improve healthcare in the country. To find out about three of Withings devices – their smartwatch, their urine monitor, and smart scales – our reporter Katie Lee went to Withings HQ just outside Paris. She met with mechanical team leader Manon Navellou, and PR manager Thi Nguyen.

[Thi] Since Withings was created back in 2008, we’ve seen a drastic change in the medical landscape. What do we notice, and especially lately after Covid, we see that people have a switch in their relationship with healthcare professionals. We have also seen a growth in personal devices to help them monitor their health from home. So all our devices are actually participating to change that landscape. And because the healthcare professional sector is very busy, we see that we are also improving the relationship between the patients and the doctors.

[Manon] Okay, so this is a Body Scan, it looks like a black scale but you have a handle on the upper part of the scale that you can pull up to one metre, a little more. When you grab the handle, you can see that there are four electrodes on it that help you to do some measurements, a six-lead ECG, and segmental body composition. Body Scan is a connected health station. At Withings, we launched the first connected scales back in 2009. But since then we keep adding new features. And we allow our users to know what is behind the two digits of the weight. So with Body Scan, we wanted to give them more insight into what is happening in their body. So for instance, we’re allowed a six-lead ECG in Europe, and Body Scan is also including a handle to help give, for instance, segmental body composition. So compared to the other scales of our range, it goes deeper into the user’s health and gives more insight and more metrics of their health. So apart from the weight, it can measure, for instance, the nerve health score. So basically are the nerves located on the feet healthy or not. Sometimes, if they’re not healthy and they get damaged, it could be a sign of peripheral neuropathy, which is an early sign of diabetes of type two. So it is very important, even though you look healthy, sometimes what’s happening in your body needs to go into deeper analysis. So this is what Body Scan is allowing. Also, I was referring to segmental body composition, so not only you will understand about your weight, the muscle mass, the fat mass, the water percentage, but you will also be able to detect that for each part of your body. So the left and right arms, the trunk, and the left and right legs. So it’s very detailed. And it’s not only for athletes; it also helps you if you want to have a leg day workout, you can pinpoint the part of your body that you want to work on. Body Scan is also helping our users assess their cardiovascular health, so we help them understand the pulse wave velocity, which is one of the features which we already include in other scales, but now we complete Body Scan with the full metrics for our users, so it’s the most advanced product in terms of the scale category that we have as of today.

So now we are looking at U-Scan. It is quite a tiny device, a 90mm pebble-shaped round device. It’s white, glossy white. We can open it by turning the front part of the device, and inside is a cartridge where the test pods are. This device lives within the toilet bowl, and the only thing you have to do is pee on it. So U-Scan was announced in January this year in 2023. It’s the world’s first hands-free connected home urine lab. So it’s a pebble-shaped device which took four years for the Withings team to develop, and it will allow you to perform your analysis from your home toilet. On the back of the product, we can see a tiny grey area, a collecting point where the urine is collected. And the pebble shape of the device allows the urine to flow around it and to go really on this tiny spot. U-Scan will enable a non-invasive way to perform your analysis. It’s a very miniaturised lab that we put on the toilet bowl of the users, which allows them to perform urine analysis not on a daily basis, but more often than when you go to the lab. Urine is very full of information. There are 3,000 metabolites in urine, so it can tell us a lot about a person’s health and general state. Urine is also a very available liquid which is disposable, but nobody’s using it on a daily basis to know what’s happening to their own body. So we decided to perform urine analysis more often. And to allow this to our users in order for them not to wait for the annual test in the lab but to perform this test more frequently. U-Scan is addressing different first use cases. The first use case that we have will be through two first cartridges. The first one is U-Scan Cycle Sync to help women understand their menstrual cycle; for instance, with the LH peak, they will know about the window of when they will have the period. But also it’s important to help them monitor their hydration level and nutritional level, so we try to put all those biomarkers available through the test. And then they will, of course, receive the results in the Withings app. U-Scan’s nutribalance cartridge will also enable analysis of specific (gravity? 7:43), pH level, vitamin C, and ketone levels. It will help people monitor their metabolic intake to optimise their daily hydration and nutrients. So overall, we are addressing those two first use cases in order to help out the general population – not necessarily people who already suffer from a specific disease, but also to help them understand what’s happening in their body.

Finally, the Scan Watch. You can’t tell the difference with a traditional watch when you see it like this. It has three hands, there is a smaller dial on the lower part of the dial. And this dial is for activity tracking. So Scan Watch is an analytical watch. It helps you follow your heart activity with a heart rate. It also allows you to perform one-lead ECG, and it will tell you about the level of SpO2, especially when you sleep, when you can still wear the watch –contrary to other watches on the market, we do have a watch which has 30 days of autonomy. So you don’t need to put your watch on charge during the night, you can still wear it over time. And of course it will help the users follow activity. The reason why we choose to have a traditional look for Scan Watch is first, our users are looking mostly not to have an extension of the smartphone on their wrist, but to still have of course the hours display, and on top of it, information about their health. So the reason why this kind of watch is that simple and has that classical look is because we didn’t want to disturb the user’s habits by still providing them a tool to monitor their health and to give the time. Scan Watch has a 30 days battery life. This has been made possible because we have a lot of engineers working here. We design even our sensors internally, and this helps us to be able to miniaturise all our components. Also we worked on the software to optimise the electrical consumption of every electronic component.

In the future, Withings would like to help users to understand their health deeper and better, so we are trying to look at ways to monitor new biomarkers. U-Scan is a perfect example, because over time we’ll develop new cartridges which could be used with the same device, but which will allow monitoring of new biomarkers. It will also help doctors to understand what is happening in the patient’s life without having them come to the office too often. But we need to be precise that Withings is not replacing any doctors. We are helping them to understand what’s happening in their health, but we’re not giving any diagnosis. This is the doctor’s job. We just want to help this link between the patient and the healthcare professional.

Withings is a company whose products stand out in the market, and it’s important for them to iterate every day. They design something, prototype it, test it, make modifications, and then they start the loop all over again. To help in this process. They’ve chosen to use PTC’s cloud-based computer-aided design platform Onshape. With Onshape, the Withings engineers no longer have to waste time worrying about data management and PDM, and they can spend more of their time focusing on product design innovation. That’s because Onshape is the only cloud-native CAD and PDM system in the world. Our built-in PDM system automatically tracks every design change over the lifetime of a project. It lets Withings instantly return to prior iterations if needed – any prior state of a model, if needed. Our cloud-native platform combines PDM and CAD for the same cost as just CAD – actually lower than you typically pay even for just CAD. It saves Withings more than $50,000 each year. The Withings core engineering team in France is able to instantly, in real time, share the latest design changes with engineers and manufacturing partners in Hong Kong, in China, anywhere on Earth. 

Withings also credits two unique Onshape collaboration tools – branching and merging, and multipart studios – in helping them accelerate this design process. Multiple Withings engineers can simultaneously branch off a main design and explore alternative design variations independently, and they later come back and use Onshape’s merge feature to bring the best ideas into the final design, the one they want to release, which they then use PDM to release. Onshape’s branching and merging is unique. It fits right into the Onshape modelling environment, and in Onshape modelling, you’re getting more benefit because it allows engineers to design multiple related parts at the same time, in the same part modelling environment, versus bouncing back and forth between individual part files. This process mimics the way the brain works for creating assemblies. 

And our multi-part in Onshape, the multipart parts studio approach, really works smoothly with the PDM and Onshape so you can release individual parts. That’s a real problem with old-fashioned file based systems. And it makes it much, much easier for modern teams in Onshape to use multi-part design. I love Withings in particular because while Withings is an Onshape customer, I’m also a Withings customer, in that I actually own a Withings scale and I think it’s been critical to me and my personal fitness and recent successful weight loss. You have to try it to understand what it can do for you personally. It’s a fantastic product – and you can count me as one of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of people around the world that Withings has helped lead a healthier life.