My wife bought a scale that tells you more than your weight. It’s called Hume and it gives a whole bunch of data to you about your body. You stand on it barefoot and hold a handle with sensors on it and it gives you your fat percentage, lean mass, subcutaneous fat mass, body water percentage, heart rate, and more information.

It seems interesting and I’ll try it for a few more weeks, but I’m questioning the accuracy of it. First of all, it had my body fat percentage go up over 3% in 10 days. That seems odd. And it says my heart rate is higher than I think it is. Yesterday and today I canceled and redid my first weigh-in because it said my heart rate was above 80 yesterday and 78 today. I know that when I wake up in the morning my heart rate is not that high. My second reading today was 70. I then took out our blood pressure monitor which also measures my heart rate and it measured it at 57.

Sometimes I think too many features are put onto things and they come at a cost to other features. In this day and age, heart rate should be a low bar for accuracy. Being off about 20 beats a minute is not acceptable. I don’t want ‘all the bells and whistles’ if they are not hitting accurate notes.

Again, I’ll try this new toy out for a couple more weeks, but I have to say I’m disappointed so far, and if it can’t get heart rate and body fat percentage right, can you blame me for questioning the other results? And if I’m not accurately tracking these data points, why would I use the product, no matter what bells and whistles it claims to offer.