Withings Health Mate Reviews

I don’t normally write reviews, but in light of the harsh criticisms of the new app and its functionality I would like to share my experiences as a long time Withings and now Nokia customer. I disagree with some of the opinions of others regarding the new app. I went into it with an open mind (after the initial worry when I saw it was “new”) and after using it now for a while have discovered it is better in many ways. WithingsHealthMate is easier to navigate, it is in fact more intuitive to use not less. Even though I appreciated many of the features of the previous app (some of which ARE missing from the current app), I find the new app much easier to navigate. I also find the summary pages easier to find information on as well as easier on the eyes. Nokia is a company who has been around for decades, they haven’t stayed in business by producing irrelevant products or ignoring their customers (I don’t work for them, I work in the medical field). So instead of flambéing them on the reviews, settle down, email them with suggestions and have some patience. Just my two cents, carry on...

I adore this product for its sleek lines how easy it is to use and how it looks when I’m wearing it. Yes, it counts steps lower then other step counters but I am just looking for a baseline and day to day progress so once I had a month in that wasn’t an issue. My reason for choosing the model I did the Steel HR was for heart rate and sleep tracking and here is where I am constantly feeling somewhat disappointed. I love this feature and the HR monitoring seems to do well. The sleep tracker however needs some major improvements, when it’s working it’s fantastic but you can’t really track sleep if it doesn’t even pick up you’ve slept 2 or 3 nights a week OR doesn’t record sleep activity until after the first time you’ve gotten out of bed to use the bathroom at 2 am. I’ve looked at all the fixes and reasons this might occur and none of them make sense to me. I don’t shake my arm wildly after I get into bed and often wake 3-4 hours after going to sleep in the same position I fell asleep, yet the tracker does not record. More frustrating is when it fails to record a night at all. It keeps record of my sleep heart rate, why is it not giving me sleep data? So I love it’s sleek design, it’s exercise features, and much of what they are trying to do but it’s more a a parlor game then a health gadget at this time. It does have a clock and the ability to get notifications is a huge plus. Fix the sleep tracking and it’d be a 5 star.

This was a good app and blood pressure monitor when it was originally released. The new owners have turned the blood pressure cuff into a brick. I’ve lost over a year of health data because of the “updates”. The most recent update resulted in WithingsHealthMate no longer recognizing a device I’ve been using for over a year. WithingsHealthMate also now requires the user to create an account and to share health data with them. This is frankly another ignorant move to try to collect used data to use for marketing. This is no longer a health app for that reason. Save yourself some money and privacy and buy the simple blood pressure monitor from your local pharmacy. One that just uses batteries instead of you’d private information.

Update: a customer service person responded to this review promptly. The response included an apology. However the response did NOT include a solution. If Nokia can’t offer a solution I want a refund. The device stopped working because of a forced update that Nokia sent out.

Update: I contacted Withings customer service by email and requested a full refund. Withings responded by saying they will only warranty for 30 days. Even if they make the device useless due to their failure they will not refund the purchase. They are very stubborn and just thank you for your patience. Once they get your money that’s all they want. Save yourself a lot of money and buy the stand alone blood pressure device you can get from your local pharmacy.

It’s an average app, for what it is meant to do. Data collection and presentation are at the core of the product. Unfortunately, WithingsHealthMate tries to hard to make data relevant, and becomes inconsistent across the experience. Want to see your aggregate sleep for the week? Awesome! Now try to go back to the screen you were on. The UI sometimes choose to provide no way of going back. So, then your only choice is to exit WithingsHealthMate and start over. Want to rotate WithingsHealthMate ? Cool...that will work, sometimes. Other times it’s like fighting with an obstinate spouse. Not happening unless it wants to make it happen. Useful things like, average REM sleep are missing (or possibly buried so that can’t find it easily). WithingsHealthMate desperately needs sparklines to be extended to many categories, and I should be able to choose which categories, in my dashboard. The weight, steps and sleep sparklines are great. Why not use them in a daily snapshot that represents the last week, in one dashboard view that also shows the other things that are already being captured? It’s the inconsistency that is holding WithingsHealthMate back.
BTW, this the kind of rating and review that happens when a popup requests my feedback in the middle of me just trying to go about my daily review routine. Stop doing it, no one likes it.

It’s been buggy since I’ve had it, and I have yet to find a doctor that really cares to see it or rather the data and it’s entirety. They almost are irritated that the patient is monitoring their health that closely. However that’s not a flaw of the product my main issues are it’s interoperability with products outside of the Withings ecosystem. I also feel that given the amount of data that it already consumes could provide more reporting or at least the appearance of more robust reporting. It suggests that there are insights and other elements available however I have yet to find any details, they’re always a work in progress and have been for upwards of two years as of the date of this review April 2022. However with that being said, tracking blood pressure wirelessly with their blood pressure cuff and with their tools or other hardware that all works wonderfully and you’ll be very happy it’s just a bit too proprietary for my tastes but then again what isn’t especially within the Apple ecosystem. To that end Apple users usually are paying for a premium for that non-interoperability so we should expect an extra level of exceptionalism and I don’t feel that they’re delivering on this expectation, but I’m a nit picker.

Update 1/1/19: this is more of a feature request than a review: i often find myself wishing there was a current weather screen on the steel hr. the current weather (within a configurable interval) could be pushed when that particular screen is viewed. could eventually be expanded to included forecasts for the next few hours.

Updated Review: After following the link in the developer response, i learned that health mate will only show an app in its notifications list, if WithingsHealthMate pushed a notification while health mate was running in the background. this is why i never saw google calendar as an option for watch notifications. this isn’t very intuitive; i would suggest adding help text that explains this. Still a good app tho!

Original Review: The new notification and on-watch workout selection systems are game changers for the steel hr. Kudos to the deva for delivering these features. I just have a few minor quibbles: 1) no google calendar notifications. 2) the new workout mode continuously shows the elapsed time in full brightness instead on-demand check ins. 3) it would also be nice to see a summary (elapsed time, avg and peak hr, etc) when you complete a workout. Keep up the good work!

Update: I updated the review as it seems to be working better. The 301 error is solved by a slight adjustment (white unit is parallel to my upper arm and none of the cuff is touching anything hard). To sync with the Apple Health, once the cuff has synced to the Withings app, I close i the Withings app and then open it again, swipe down, and it then syncs fine with the Apple app. It still seems to give different readings than my other two cuffs (sometimes as much as 10mmhg for systolic; diastolic is basically the same) but not all of the time; I’ll work on that. 🙂
I’ve had the blood pressure monitor for about a month and for the most part it works pretty well, although often times it is much lower than my other two cuffs. Sometimes it gives me a 301 error, which I have not figured out why yet since it seems to be in the exact same position on my arm (I take my BP sitting in the exact same place every time and the different cuffs are in the same position). WithingsHealthMate does a pretty good job at syncing up with the cuff ( as in real time), but does not sync well with the Apple health app - sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. I have not figured out that one yet.

This has been a great investment for my personal program of activity. I am 55 and interested in monitoring my activity. A great feature of this watch and app has been monitoring my sleep patterns and blood pressure. I have been researching how to get better sleep patterns with diet and exercise factors.
I like the fact that the alarm on my watch vibrates to wake me up to get to Crossfit class without waking my wife. I looked at many options when trying to find a device that would help track mostly my sleep patterns. I am working with my physician in also trying to monitor oxygen levels and other factors.
I like the feature that Nokia has of measuring steps taken in a day with the smaller dial. It helps motivate me to walk more. Also, like the feature where I activate the watch at the start of my workout and end it at the end of the workout.
In my opinion, this is a great addition to a good fitness program. It is helping me find a good sleep routine to make the best of my overall daily fitness.

Set up is not a good experience- lots of glitches and warning signs ( why do I have to keep entering my Apple ID? What do you mean “payment processed?). I wanted a scale. I do not want advertisements for sleep trackers etc. and drivel passing as insights (Did I know weight is important? Actually, yes: why do you think I got this scale?). I have gotten the family set up on the scale (relatively painless) but my wife can’t get it to talk to her phone.

I wish the developers would just focus on weighing us and communicating with a smart phone over Bluetooth. I don’t want an account and another password. I would like the displays simplified so you can see weight over time (with dates) and maybe other parameters on their own page. WithingsHealthMate tries to squeeze way too much onto the screen of an iPhone.

As for the scale, it is quite sensitive but not stable. I stand there watching it flip tenth of a pound digits so long that sometimes the scale shuts down without a reading. A little signal filtering would help. Also, the percent body fat is all over the map (I doubt it fluctuates by more that 1% day to day). But I do like the display and being ableto track progress.

I’ve had WithingsHealthMate for years. I used it to monitor my steps years before Apple Heath and Apple Watch. I eventually purchased the scale, blood pressure monitor, & most recently, the sleep tracker app. Recently, I started receiving multiple weight measurements every day. I noticed that whenever I opened WithingsHealthMate a new weight measurement would appear even if I hadn’t stepped on the scale that day. So I contacted support. I was asked to provide a considerable amount of information, which I happily did as I assumed it would lead to my problem being resolved more quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Here is the response I received, “Our development team is aware of the loop effect which is causing this issue to take place (HM → other app → AH → HM).

I do apologize however, we do not have a planned fix, we recommend users only export from Apple Health.“

My reply was that their response was unacceptable as according to the description in WithingsHealthMate Store at the time was that WithingsHealthMate “plays well with others” (in all caps). I was assured that my concerns would be forwarded to the development team. This was On May 13th. Apparently my concerns aren’t worth much as I haven’t heard from anyone & it’s now the end of May.

WithingsHealthMate has been on my phone for several years. The last few updates have seen a nosedive in quality.
First, WithingsHealthMate now requires multiple authentications before opening if you have passcode access on. Inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker. Then, WithingsHealthMate started adding phantom steps when the phone was charging. It’d add steps at a constant rate during times when the phone, and any step counters, were stationary, at a fixed rate (usually 270 steps/hour). When attempting to shut off step counting in WithingsHealthMate , I found it was no longer possible - and when I contacted support about it, I had to send them screenshots from my app to prove to them the option was missing. Support was unable to help, so eventually I just removed WithingsHealthMate ’s permission to write steps to Apple health at the OS level. I updated today hoping they’d been addressing these issues but now it’s no longer even *importing* step data from the Apple health app (it cuts off right at the time I updated!)
I hope the developer can successfully address these issues. I really like their health hardware, and the software, until about six months ago, has been rock solid. But if it continues in this fashion I’m not going to have any use at all for it.

WithingsHealthMate itself is great, love the beautiful interface and overall UX, it’s highly modern and easy to understand data at a glance. The sleep tracking portion is my favorite part of WithingsHealthMate , and seeing if I’m getting enough sleep over long periods of time is very valuable for me. I’m currently using a Withings Pulse HR and Body scale to upload metrics. My main complaint is with the Pulse HR not WithingsHealthMate itself. It won’t track swim distance, even with phone nearby, only heart rate and duration of swim. I feel that there is probably a way for Withings to track that metric if they wanted, as the Pulse HR can easily track walk distance. The other sore point of Pulse HR and app is that it won’t recognize a nap, and add it to sleep score. No major complaints with Body scale except that hardware itself is a little buggy and seems to take a little while to upload data and prepare itself for next user to step on scale, if being user by a whole family. Lastly I love that I can manually add in my own BP, temp, heart rate and other metrics as needed.

I am such a fan of and very grateful for my Withings watch and app. It has been a great support for me to understand my sleep so I can identify how deep I’m sleeping as a vital element of my health during some trying, long-term health challenges.

This 1 star review is not for the watch/app overall, it is for the sleep score update. I find it very damaging to rate the quality of our sleep on a point system of 1-100, most especially the negative evaluations of each element of sleep. Examples of these are:

“Sleep score 20. Depth= Bad.”

“2hrs 6mins isn’t much...try to sleep a little longer tonight.” Next to a bright orange exclamation point.

“OK, so, it’s time to bring sleep back into your life.” Next to a bright red exclamation point.

“Your bed and rise times diverge too much from those of these last few days.” Next to a bring red exclamation point. (This was a night I slept well and long.)

As if I don’t already feel the weight of my lack of sleep and it’s negative reflection on my health challenges. As if I don’t already feel stressed and even grieved about the harsh reality of being unable to sleep well. As if I should “Just try harder! Just do better!” As if we don’t get this message enough in every other area of life.

They need to make these CRITICAL COMMENTS OPTIONAL. Make the sleep NEGATIVE SCORE OPTIONAL.

Sleep is valuable and clearly we want POSITIVE SUPPORT about it.

Thank you for your care and attempted support.

A little more than a year ago I wanted a hybrid watch to track my activity and I started my searching Journey for a perfect product which would be a device and supporting application. I started trying hybrid smartwatches with their respective health app like Skagen, Michael Kors, Fitbit, Garmin, Suunto and many of the products were good but the health apps that supports them were not, till I came across the Withings which became Nokia and now Withings again. When I tried hybrid watch steel HR with its health app I was amazed, it simply speaks my language :)
I have been using WithingsHealthMate with watch for a little over a year now and I must say I am impressed by design, functionality and practicality of it. Step, sleep, activity, Heartbeat tracking, they all are displayed on one screen with Minimalistic looks, and yet not cluttered and confusing like other competitors. This is exactly what I wanted and it delivers the way I like it, so I give 5 STARS!!!

I have a BPM Connect BP monitor and a Smart Body Analyzer scale that I use daily. I’ve had the scale for years and am very pleased with it (although I can’t use it in a humid bathroom because it changes units and I have no idea what a stone pound is!). The BP monitor is also working well 6 months in.

Well, I started experiencing a crash (when clicking into the BP history) in WithingsHealthMate early this year. Eventually in June got annoyed enough to open a ticket with Withings support. Finally today in October it’s been fixed! Withings support was quite attentive, checking in every couple of weeks, but not in an annoying “please check if it still occurs” kind of way. It felt like a long time to wait for a fix but four months is really pretty good for a nuisance with a minor impact to me. Many developers wouldn’t even bother to respond in a case like this. So thanks, Withings, and cheers!

I’m very pleased with what I’ve experienced thus far. On WW, I focused on recording everything I ate, exercised vigorously and lost 60 lbs. 6 years later, after a heart valve replacement, the weight returned. Now that I’m feeling better the nutritionist at cardio rehab suggested this. Because I’m a competitive spirit, and a numbers guy, I got a fit bit and even a smart scale to assist me. Although only 2weeks into it, already down 7 lbs, I really am pleased. Monitoring levels of nutrients, calories, and everything else allows me the opportunity to understand what foods provide proper balance. I’ve increased my fiber intake, while reducing carbs and sugar, but right now I’m focusing on dropping my sodium levels. I truly am impressed with the easy to use technology. My blood pressure has improved, I’m feeling good and seem to have more energy. Very useful tool, glad to recommend. 5 Stars!

I enjoy using this with my HR Steel but I’ve noticed some weird UI issues. It has yet to learn that I do not swim. I do not swim. I do not swim. I always select ‘fitness’ when I do circuit training. I circuit train, walk, and occasionally run. Yet it continues to insist that I swim. It has asked me twice if it was right, both times I said no and selected fitness. It still says I’m swimming. Very annoying.

Secondly, the UI looks poor on iPhone X. ‘Synchronizing’ message is cut off at the top, it somehow appears above the native UI navigation (to go back to the previous app/search), and the toggles do not reach the bottom of the display which would fix the UI issue. Strange that I’ve had no issues with other major apps in this regard, just this one.

Please fix the darn watch insisting that I’m swimming. Fix it so it actually learns and stops auto-selecting what I’m doing when I’ve told it countless times what I am actually doing.

I was a long time Withings scale user when it was acquired by Nokia and WithingsHealthMate was created. I used a combination of WithingsHealthMate, IFTTT and Apple Heath to export my weight data to an app I liked better for weight tracking. I basically never bothered opening WithingsHealthMate because it didn’t have any data I was interested in.

I recently had to replace my smart scale and just connected the new one today. I’m frankly amazed at how useful WithingsHealthMate finally is! It imported so much great data from Apple Health — steps, average heart rate (I have an Apple Watch), etc. Plus, the weight charts have a line that averages out daily weigh ins to more easily show you your weight trends.

I feel like a lot of what I missed out on from moving from a Fitbit tracker to Apple Watch is back within my grasp. Very pleasantly surprised! Looking forward to using WithingsHealthMate to stay motivated regarding health.

Using the BP trend graph is like Snoopy trying to wrestle with the lawn chair at Thanksgiving. Please let me pinch zoom and horizontally slide to view the range of dates that I want to see. Quit snapping it to strict weeks or months. I was discharged from the hospital toward the end of last month. I want to take a screenshot of my BP trend since then, with the last reading selected and annotated with the raw numbers. This stupid trend graph won’t let me view all my numbers on one screen, because they don’t fit into a single week or month. Moronic.

The temperature input controls are vertically reversed from the rest. Confusing. For BP and weight, the bigger numbers are below. But for temperature the bigger numbers are above. Seriously? Suggestion: make the vertical direction consistent across all inputs. Don’t most people think about bigger numbers being above smaller numbers? Maybe this is a UI conspiracy to force me to buy expensive blue tooth health devices.

I purchased a Withings watch primarily because of the looks, but I still wanted to track steps and general activity. I have owned an Apple Watch, Fitbit and Halo and in the end just couldn’t keep an athletic looking watch on my wrist day ina me day out. And the apps were nothing special with those. Hands down this is the most educational, interactive, clean interface and easy to use of all available. I am continually blown away by the content they are providing. It is similar to an app our company PAYS for to provide this sort of content to help keep employees healthy. Love love LOVE my watch and if possible, love it even MORE because of WithingsHealthMate. It is now an indispensable part of my life and I say that without regrets. I have never written an app review. But I literally get so excited about this one that I had to…and to thank the developers for a job well done!

I love my 36mm steel hr, but I wish WithingsHealthMate were better. The timeline feature is nice for scrolling, but it doesn’t really provide any motivation. I’m also not sure what the dashboard adds, given the timeline also gives you daily info. Compare that to fitbit’s app, say, which allows you to set a goal for number of times you exercise per week, and then fills in those segments as you complete them. (Last time I checked, withings didn’t even let you set a general activity goal; it was just like “run x times per week.) Or how apple watch famously has you try to complete your activity circles.

I would change the dashboard to be the home screen and have something like weekly view with tiles for the various things you’re tracking (steps, sleep, exercise) and how you’re hitting those goals. It could be pretty similar to the week in review on the timeline, with some tweaks to make it more like goal tracking and bigger/easier to parse. (So for instance, I like the weekly sleep display, showing duration and color for quality. If you had that as the week went on, filling in day by day, you might have a better sense “wow I’ve been sleeping poorly this week” or “look how well I’m doing, don’t want to break the chain.”) Then you could click over to the timeline for scrolling. Or what I described could be pinned to the top of the timeline and you could scroll below.

This was a good app and blood pressure monitor when it was originally released. The new owners have turned the blood pressure cuff into a brick. I’ve lost over a year of health data because of the “updates”. The most recent update resulted in WithingsHealthMate no longer recognizing a device I’ve been using for over a year. WithingsHealthMate also now requires the user to create an account and to share health data with them. This is frankly another ignorant move to try to collect used data to use for marketing. This is no longer a health app for that reason. Save yourself some money and privacy and buy the simple blood pressure monitor from your local pharmacy. One that just uses batteries instead of you’d private information.

Update: a customer service person responded to this review promptly. The response included an apology. However the response did NOT include a solution. If Nokia can’t offer a solution I want a refund. The device stopped working because of a forced update that Nokia sent out.

Update: I contacted Withings customer service by email and requested a full refund. Withings responded by saying they will only warranty for 30 days. Even if they make the device useless due to their failure they will not refund the purchase. They are very stubborn and just thank you for your patience. Once they get your money that’s all they want. Save yourself a lot of money and buy the stand alone blood pressure device you can get from your local pharmacy.

I have been using Withings to track weight for many years now, and I do appreciate how seamlessly the whole system works. However two issues have at last inspired me to write a three star review.
First - the algorithms for calculating your “running average” are clearly not reasonable. They weight the data in some funky way, and there are times where it is obvious on the chart that this average is way off. I recently had a spike upward in weight of about two pounds, which lasted about a week, and my running average for that period shows my weight decreasing. Annoying for such a simple thing to be so clearly wrong.
Second - WithingsHealthMate advertises itself as compatible with the Apple product line of health apps, and you can opt to “share data” with your Apple health app. This is false advertising. Withings TAKES data from Apple, but it does not SEND any data to Apple. Sharing is only one directional - and not, in my mind, what the word sharing is all about. I do not trust this company. I want to own my health data, not give it to someone who keeps it and won’t let me do what I want with it. I wish I knew of an alternative to recommend instead, but alas, I do not.

Update: the developer reached out and explained how to get the data into the apple Health app so everything works great now! It was easy to do - just not exactly how I thought it would be done. The health stuff is all new to me so definitely a learning curve on my part. Changing rating from 4 to 5 stars.

Original: Overall, I’m very happy with the cuff I bought and WithingsHealthMate . It seems like a recent update helped the cuff pair with WithingsHealthMate faster which resolved what would have been my only real complaint. One enhancement that would be wonderful is to have WithingsHealthMate write the BP results directly into the apple health app like so many other health related apps do. I like having all my health stuff in one place, the health app, so it’s an added step every morning.

I bought the Nokia Steel HR watch tracker because I liked the simple beautiful classic design. I also bought a Fitbit Alta HR to compare the two. This is the first time I’ve used any tracker. I don’t care for Fitbit-style trackers because they are chunky, uncomfortable, and not at all attractive. The Nokia Steel, on the other hand, is beautiful, nice enough to wear to work, and is very comfortable. I love it and I wanted to love WithingsHealthMate . I don’t. Sadly, the Health Mate app pales in comparison to the Fitbit app. Such a disappointment. If could pair the Nokia Steel HR with the Fitbit app life would be perfect. Here’s what I’d love to see WithingsHealthMate do: water tracker, send hourly reminders to get up and move (personally I need this), sync with Weight Watchers and SparkPeople, ability to edit dashboard to better meet and see personal goals. The interface is awkward and not motivating. But I’m holding on to my Nokia Steel HR because it does help me see my progress in a minimal bare-bones way, I’ll just use my iPhone for those notifications I want, and track water on the SparkPeople app. Was hoping to do all that in one place, though.

In general I am quite satisfied with WithingsHealthMate. I’ve been using it for years with my Withings corded BP cuff. Just plug it in, let it do it’s thing, then review your results and look at your graph. All very good.

However, I do not like the changes you have made to the color coded BP ranges. I realize that guidelines on BP may have been relaxed somewhat. However as I have high BP and am on meds I like to keep a close eye on it and have strict standards for myself. I do not like that the “Elevated” range is now coded with green rather than yellow. I want to be visually alerted if my results go outside the “Normal” range. Perhaps allow the user to modify the colors? Your development team apparently forgot to change the colors displayed on the timeline, so we have inconsistent color coding from one screen to another!

As others have commented, it is disappointing that WithingsHealthMate can not adjust to portrait mode (other apps are able to deal with this).

This watch has RIDICULOUS battery life. Mine lasted almost 2 weeks with full use and it was only down to 43%. I charged it up and after a week it's still almost at 100%. I used it this week on a cruise and when my phone changed time, I would open WithingsHealthMate and watch it sync, and the watch hands would jump to the new correct time. Great functionality.

Developers: if you guys could add a feature to skip music tracks or change volume, this would hands down be the best watch ever in the entire universe. The music/volume control was a deal breaker feature for me, BUT since it has stupid long battery life I bought it anyways. If you could add this feature in the future I would absolutely adore this watch 10x more than I already do.

Thank you :)

I’ve had the Steel HR (white face) 14 days so far.
The styling is well done.
The silicon band is very supple and comfortable.
Color of the housing is spot on.
The sleep app (Health Mate) is for the most part fairly accurate although some nights it doesn’t start until hours later. Thankfully I can manually edit the start/stop times.

IMPROVEMENTS
The numbers on the face should be bolder to make them easier to read. The minute hand doesn’t quite line up with the marks.
The hands are elegant but could be a little wider to make reading them easier.
I did have some problems setting up the sync with my iPhone 6S but made a few adjustments on my iPhone settings regarding notifications and now it syncs well.

Overall I do enjoy the smart watch and believe it’s a good buy for those people who enjoy seeing an analog face AND having some digital features.

8-2-19 Update. 17 days
After multiple failures of sleep monitoring and failures of various notifications (texts and emails) I am returning the smart watch.
8-4-19
I thought I should add this. I can’t confirm it but I believe the addition of the Health Mate program to my iPhone seemed to deplete the iPhone battery. Since removing the Health Mate program from my iPhone the battery does not appear to decrease in strength at the dramatic rate it did when the Health Mate program was installed.