Withings Body Comp smart scale measures nerve health and visceral fat

Withings has launched the new Body Comp smart scale, and delves into the world of subscription services.

The Body Comp joins its Body, Body+ and Body Cardio connected scales, promising improved sensor accuracy when measuring weight and body composition.

Read this: Best fitness trackers to buy right now

The onboard sensors and algorithms that help interpret the data will dish out full body composition insights covering weight, muscle mass, fat mass, water %, bone mass and BMI.

Withings has also added the ability to track visceral fat, which is the fat hidden around organs in the belly.

It'll additionally track standing heart rate and vascular age, delving into the realms of arterial health by using Pulse Wave Velocity to measure arterial stiffness to offer insights into your cardiac health.

Withings has also added a new nerve health assessment, which monitors sweat glands in the feet, and generates a Nerve Health Score. It's designed to help users understand whether there's a risk of cardiovascular or a metabolic disease such as heart attack, stroke or diabetes.

In addition to the new hardware, Withings is also introducing a new Health+ subscription service, which aims to offer actionable insights based on data generated by its new smart scale.

Withings Health+ will be an additional service available alongside the Withings Health Mate app, and will apparently unlock new details and metrics and offer six-week habit-building plans. It sounds much the same as Fitbit Premium and its relationship to the free Fitbit app.

Users can log food, mood, follow workout videos, get nutritional advice and receive weekly reports on progress.

The Body Comp smart scale will be the first Withings device to benefit from those Health+ extras when it launches on the 4 October.

You'll need to pay $209.95 for the scale and that will also get you a 12-month subscription to Health+ as well. After that subscription expires you'll need to pay $79.95 a year to keep it active.

Withings will roll out access to the service for other compatible devices at a later date.

That price tag means it's going to cost more than the Withings Body Cardio, which is currently the most expensive smart scale in its collection.

The move to add a subscription service though seems to be the big news here. Will metrics and information that should be free for grabs now disappear behind a paywall? We fear that may well be the case.