QardioBase: Wireless Smart Scale Review
As a health conscious woman who developed gestational diabetes during pregnancy, tracking my prepartum weight gain and postpartum weight loss has been important. The QardioBase does just that. This scale is beautifully designed with the aesthetic of an Apple product (see: glass top and an un-intrusive electronic display screen.) It records the weight of multiple users, includes a pregnancy mode to track progress week by week, and automatically syncs all measurements with your smart phone. Overall, the product is pretty nifty.
I love tracking my progress in the mobile app, where the use of graphs and visuals makes the data more exciting. However, despite an overall positive experience, there are improvements that Qardio can make in order to make this product accessible to those who are less tech savvy.
When I received this product, I was really excited to try it out. I took it out of the package and noticed that it needs eight AAA batteries to power the scale. After pulling the tab to activate the batteries, I followed the instructions to download the app and sync my profile. Everything worked just fine until I added my husband’s profile to the scale. At that moment, my profile disappeared and his took over, even though my phone and profile stayed connected. In my opinion, the multi-user feature does not work well. It took us a while of syncing, un-syncing, and contacting customer service before we finally figured out how to add my profile back. But oops, guess what? Now the scale stopped recognizing my husband’s profile.
Overall, I like the concept of this product, but I can only give it 3 stars. Since it has a higher price point than a regular scale, this product has a few of features it needs to improve on.
What I loved:
- The design: It’s sleek, beautiful, and makes a nice addition to your bathroom.
- The concept: How cool is it to have your scale sync with your smart phone to display graphs, muscle to fat ratio, and progress automatically?
- The Pregnancy Setting: While there clearly could be so much more info in this section of the app, this is the only scale I’ve seen that ties “weight gain” to my pregnancy.
- The firmware update: The scale was not very accurate at first, but the firmware update fixed everything within minutes.
What I’d change:
- The battery requirement: This product requires eight AAA batteries. I’m only three months into using this scale and I’m receiving an alert that it’s running low on power.
- The inability to have multiple users with ease.
- The app experience: First of all, the app is not very intuitive, and the configuration instruction is also not very clear. But the most frustrating thing is when something is wrong with the scale, it tells me that “QardioBase is not in the required state,” but does not tell me how to get remedy this.
- While the firmware update improves accuracy, it was not an easy task getting the update to happen.
All and all, I’m pleased with the product. I’m hoping that future updates will improve the overall experience.
