Overall whichwearable rating 

Value 

“The Withings Pulse OX is a discrete exercise counter that opens up a wide world of fitness and health monitoring” whichwearable

Available to buy at around £50 from Curry’s  amongst other retail and online outlets.

Withing’s Brand Promises for the Pulse Ox.

“Wear it anyway”. Wear on your belt, on your wrist or attach to your shirt. 

Activity Track Steps, elevation, Calories, running and distance 

Sleep.  Analyse your sleep to improve its quality. Not tested 

Heart Rate . Measure with a single touch. 

Blood Oxygen level . Ensure your blood oxygen level is optimal 

Why buy it?

• If you are unfit or a beginner in fitness this will get you started.
• Opens the door to other Withings products such as weight loss.
• If you have a problem with your breathing you can measure your blood oxygen level.

What could be improved?

• Screen resolution is slightly fuzzy.
• A constant notification on the Smartphone “Ox is ready to receive data” is annoying.

Reviewing the Withings Pulse Ox activity monitor is like walking into a white doctor’s room in Switzerland. This is taking your fitness seriously.Withings talk about their health “ecosystem”. This in reality is the mobile App which supports all of their products. The App can take you from counting steps to measuring and monitoring heart rate to managing weight loss. You add more Withing’s devices to the App from the Scales to the wireless blood pressure monitor.

The Withings Ox pulse at only 8g weight is a “discrete” activity device as when you wear it in its clip on your belt or attached to your running shirt or shorts you tend to forget about it.  This is a blessing as this is what good design is all about, its invisible. At first  glance it’s a step and activity counter. I thought I’d get bored with the device quickly but there is something about the simplicity of it. Battery life is around 4 days with 3 long runs  (>30 mins) and daily use.

“Wear it anyway”. Wear on your belt, on your wrist or attach to your shirt. 

The product comes with a black strap and a black rubber belt clip. A lovely Aqua blue and also a brown leather strap are available to buy as optional extras. I started with the blue strap. Having inserted the product the wrong way and got it stuck (see below, see the black device not fully inserted from the left to the right of the strap) I worked out that the product is designed to fit to lock in the slot of the straps only one way. As the device is inserted into the metal surround it tightens with its fit. The User Interface of the device does not automatically adjust for the strap which meant that I had to take it out so I could use the device with the strap. The challenge here is the display is landscape and you want to have it portrait mode when using it like a watch . When you customise the display and make it portrait the text size is a little too small for me.

Running data remains in landscape mode so you have to turn your head to read what you are doing. My personal conclusion was then to switch to the belt clip for activity. I did love the Aqua blue strap though and it does make it out as a design statement. I did get comments on the brown leather strap too.

So if you want to get comments buy the blue or brown straps. If you want to exercise use the belt clip

As stated the device can be put on a belt, carried in your pocket standalone, on your shirt or worn like a watch with a strap.

Like the second generation Apple iPod Shuffle the Withing’s Ox can be clipped anywhere and that’s a real winning design.

I attached the unit to my belt at work, running outdoors and indoors. This was great. Taking it out in the forest I thought I’d come back without it but it stayed on around my neck and on my waist.

Steps and distance and calories were all recored well and comparable to my other devices on board ( Android Wear watch counting steps and distance). When the device is clipped to you, you tend to forget about it and I like that. This device becomes discrete and you get on with day without worrying about what you have been doing.

Heart Rate 

When you want to measure your rate you can do it by taking the device out pressing the heart symbol and placing your finger under the unit. The device scans your finger and gives you a good figure for heart rate. I compared it with my Android watch heart rate figure and they were within 5 BPM so I can say that the accuracy is pretty good. I like the idea that you make the choice to scan your heart rate as opposed to other devices that do it without asking and log your heart rate to the cloud in a blink of an eye.

Oximetry, Blood Oxygen level

Now this is a new one me , blood oxygen level. Pulse oximetry is a test used to measure the oxygen level (oxygen saturation) of the blood. It is an easy, painless measure of how well oxygen is being sent to parts of your body furthest from your heart, such as the arms and legs.

This is simple to do, just select the O2 symbol on the screen, place your finger under the device and get your blood oxygen level. My figure was always 98%. Saturation of 98% means that 98% of the total amount of haemoglobin in the body is filled with oxygen molecules.

• An SpO2 of greater than 95% is generally considered to be normal.
• An SpO2 of 92% or less suggests hypoxemia which means you need Oxygen badly!

In a patient with acute respiratory illness or breathing difficulty (e.g, an asthma attack), an SpO2 of 92% or less may indicate a need for oxygen supplementation.

This information is needed in many kinds of situations. It may be used to test for :

• To see how well lung medicines are working.
• To check a person’s ability to handle increased activity levels.
• To check a person has moments when breathing stops during sleep.

Pulse oximetry is also used to check the health of a person with any condition that affects blood oxygen levels, such as a heart attack or heart failure.

At the weekend a friend by chance remarked that his friend was in hospital with a collapsed lung and his Pulse Oximetry was low so there is a dramatic case where it comes into action. A range of pulse oximetry devices (The device below) is also available at Amazon.co.uk

Activity Track Steps, elevation, Calories, running and distance 

I wore the device at work measuring my steps and also on runs in the forest and on the treadmill. The daily target of 10,000 steps cannot be adjusted which may annoy some people. The device measures distance run and calories and even elevation if you are interested. I did not do an exhaustive set of tests here but can say that the results were reasonable compared with my smartwatch counter.

Bug or design Bluetooth notification?

You will see a notification that won’t go away on Android products highlighted in RED below “Withings Bluetooth…ready to receive data”. This is annoying as it interferes with your daily use of you phone and the product tells you that you need this to receive data. If you go into the App you can disable it and you can still use the Ox so I would ask Withings to get rid of it please.

Sleep

I don’t evaluate products that monitor sleep. Why, because having gone through a period of  sleep trouble myself  I know that thinking about it, monitoring can be the worst thing to do as it focused your mind on “I may have a sleep problem” and this can make your sleep worse. I would recommend NOT using wearables to monitor sleep PERIOD! Sorry about that if you after a sleep review.

The App

The App is the central location to connect many of the Withing’s product and it monitors basic information and encourages you to lose weight or challenges friends. One key criteria for success of this App is the integration with other key fitness Apps such as Runkeeper for offloading the data from runs.

The screenshot below shows a buttefly and your focus on each of the health covering weight, activity, sleep and heart. This is TOP DOWN approach to health monitoring.

The Dashboard records all of your key measurements. The basics steps and calories. Integration with other data Apps such as Runkeeper makes this such as great App. Blood pressure after measuring is shown here. Blood pressure is automatically plotted onto a graph. This is handy if you wanted to show the doctor your blood pressure over a week if you are concerned about it.

Activity over the week is analysed.

Awards and movitation is given for personal records you have broken.

Weight management . You can set your target weight by dragging your finger up or down on the weight scale below. The scale is great as you can see your BMI and see if you are technically “overweight” or “obese”.

You can join the New Year Weight loss program. How is that instead of paying monthly fees to weight loss programs!

Withings encourage you to ask others to join in and participate in challenges. I like this touch.

For more on Withings products visit their website.