At CES 2026, Withings is trying to turn the most humbling gadget in your bathroom into something bigger than a number on a screen. Instead of a scale that silently judges you every morning, the new Body Scan 2 is pitched as a kind of home “longevity station” — a device that checks in on how well your heart, metabolism, and cells are doing, in about the time it takes to brush your teeth.
On paper, the Body Scan 2 is still a smart scale: a slab of tempered glass you step on, with a retractable handle you pull up to complete the scan. It packs eight electrodes in the base and four more in the handle, a design that lets it send current through both your legs and your upper body instead of just your feet. That matters because most smart scales only use lower-body data and then guess the rest, which is handy but not exactly clinical-grade. Withings’ pitch is that if you’re going to plant a health gadget in a place you visit every morning, it might as well work harder than that.
What Withings is really selling here is the idea of a 90‑second checkup that goes way beyond weight. Step on, grab the handle, and the Body Scan 2 runs what it calls a “multimodal longevity assessment,” crunching over 60 biomarkers split across a handful of buckets: how strongly and efficiently your heart is pumping, how your heart’s electrical activity looks, your risk of hypertension, the stiffness of your arteries, cellular health and metabolic efficiency, and how well your body handles blood sugar. Instead of dumping a wall of numbers on you, the companion app distills all of this into a Health Trajectory score — a kind of visual snapshot of your “healthspan,” or how many years of good health your current habits are buying you.
Under the hood, the scale leans on a grab bag of techniques that used to belong in research labs and specialty clinics. A big one is impedance cardiography, which uses tiny electrical signals to estimate how much blood your heart pushes out with each beat and how well it’s feeding your organs. Another is bioimpedance spectroscopy, a more advanced cousin of the standard bioimpedance found in most smart scales. Instead of firing one signal through your body, it uses multiple frequencies, letting the device tease apart how water and other fluids are distributed across tissues and use that to infer things like cellular age, active cell mass, and metabolic efficiency.
Then there’s the weirdest part: foot sweat. Withings stimulates sweat glands in your feet using a safe, low current, and looks at how strongly they respond. The company points to internal data that people with poorly controlled diabetes tend to show weaker responses, and frames this as another early-warning signal about metabolic and nerve health rather than a diagnosis. Put together, it’s a very 2026 version of preventative care: a glossy slab on the bathroom floor, quietly running electrochemistry experiments while you stare at the tiles.
If this sounds like a lot for a scale, that’s intentional. Withings is trying to solve a problem that every health-tech company eventually runs into: people buy devices with good intentions and then slowly stop using them. A smartwatch can track plenty, but it also competes with notifications, battery life, and whatever new gadget shows up next year. A scale is just there, waiting in the corner, doing the same simple ritual you’ve been doing for years. Withings’ bet is that this makes it the ideal place to sneak in more serious health tracking, provided you can convince people that stepping on it is about the future of their heart and metabolism, not just today’s weight.
The company also knows that scales are emotionally loaded. For plenty of people, daily weigh‑ins are tightly tied to body image, anxiety, or disordered eating — exactly the behavior modern health apps say they want to avoid. Withings’ answer is something called Eyes‑Closed Mode. Instead of flashing a number, the scale shows only emojis on the screen, while quietly logging all the real measurements to the app for later. The idea is to reposition the scale as an overall health checkpoint rather than a scoreboard for your weight, nudging people to think in terms of longevity instead of “good” and “bad” days.
Of course, turning a bathroom scale into a quasi‑medical device also invites regulators into the picture. Not everything the Body Scan 2 wants to do is available out of the box. Two marquee features — hypertension risk notifications and a six‑lead EKG for spotting atrial fibrillation — will require FDA clearance in the US. Withings has history here: its ScanWatch took nearly two years to clear US regulators, and the Move ECG smartwatch was announced in 2019 but still hasn’t made it to US shelves. Its U‑Scan urinalysis gadget sidestepped the issue by launching as a wellness device rather than a regulated medical product. This time, the company says it is pursuing a new kind of certification aimed at getting products to market faster without watering down the underlying science, while still touting GDPR and HIPAA compliance and security certifications like ISO 27001 and 27701 to reassure privacy‑minded buyers.
Zoom out and the Body Scan 2 sits in the middle of a broader arms race around “age tech.” Whoop already has a metric designed to estimate how well you’re aging based on cardiovascular strain, sleep, and activity data. Oura offers a cardiovascular age metric that compares how “old” your heart appears relative to your birth date, and both companies have bolted on optional blood tests to give users more precise metabolic insights. Where Withings diverges is in its insistence on doing as much as possible noninvasively, in your home, without lab kits or needles. There is a certain appeal to the idea that your daily weigh‑in might quietly flag issues years before a rushed, once‑a‑year checkup does. The flip side is that consumers will need to trust that all of this complexity isn’t just a very expensive way to feel vaguely guilty about not sleeping enough.
There is also the simple matter of price. At around $600, the Body Scan 2 is several times more expensive than mainstream smart scales and firmly in the premium health‑gadget territory. The company positions the cost as an investment in long‑term health — especially compared to what a battery of lab tests and specialist visits might run — but that is still a big ask for a device whose everyday user experience comes down to: stand still, hold the bar, wait for the app. For some, the promise of tracking heart function, metabolic efficiency, and cellular markers from the bathroom will make the math work. For others, a cheaper scale and an annual doctor’s visit will feel more grounded.
Still, the Body Scan 2 hints at where consumer health tech is heading. The first-generation Body Scan already tracked around 40 biomarkers; now, Withings is up to 60, adding new ways to watch how blood moves, how cells behave, and how your metabolism shifts over time. The company talks about using “billions” of anonymized measurements from its ecosystem to define individual baselines and look for subtle, reversible deviations — the kind of thing that might not trigger an alarm at a clinic but could be enough to nudge you to book an appointment or change a habit. That’s the quiet promise behind the “longevity station” branding: not immortality, but earlier warnings and fewer surprises.
Whether bathroom‑grade diagnostics can live up to their own hype is still an open question. Bioimpedance and related methods are famously sensitive to hydration, time of day, and how consistently you measure, which is why even the more optimistic researchers tend to couch their enthusiasm in caveats. Withings itself stresses that the Body Scan 2’s more ambitious readings are not diagnostic, and that any red flags should be a reason to talk to an actual doctor, not a substitute for one. But in a world where health systems are overstretched and preventative care often boils down to “try to exercise more,” there is something undeniably appealing about the idea that a familiar household object could quietly double as a window into your future self.
So yes, it is still a scale. But if Withings has its way, it is one that asks a slightly different question when you step on it each morning — less “What do you weigh today?” and more “Where is your health heading, and what can you still change while there’s time?”
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