A Smart Scale For The Blind
Today's topic concerns scales that pair to your phone via Bluetooth and input data to your health app ofchoice.
Background
So, I'm a reasonably healthy guy in high school. I'm an athlete and I work out regularly outside of track and field, which in itself is a workout. There's really not much in the way of weight loss or gain for me to worry about, and my metabolism is young and super powerful. So, why this post?
Well, here's the thing. As you might know from reading other posts on this blog, I'm a senior in high school, and this is my last year on the track team. I want to do the best possible running I can, and that means kicking it hard at practice, pushing it hard at meets, and eating right. A lot of people don't realize just how important eating is when you're a runner. Maybe not so much as for sprinting as it is for distance running, but it's still a pretty dominant factor in how good you do. That's not to say sprinters need to cut out the bad stuff though, we should also be eating good. Last year, I just cut junk food and soda from my diet and kept on eating regularly otherwise, but this year I started consuming stuff I needed to.
For my events, the hundred and longjump, I needed to be explosive. I needed to blast out of the blocks as fast as I could and spring off the board into the sand pit. So naturally, I was going to need to eat foods that would help my muscles be like that. Now, if you needed endurance, and your muscles needed to last you a long time, then you'd want more carb heavy stuff like pasta. But me, I need to go really hard, really fast, so I needed protein.
How I tracked It All
Like I said, I'd experimented slightly with eating properly last year, but I mainly just stopped eating desserts and drinking cokes. But this year, I got more into it. I ate what I needed to and counted calories as well. On average, a male of my body hight and weight burns around 2100 calories a day, so it was advisable to eat under that amount. But with all the calories I burned working on the track, I was closer to burning 26 or 700 depending on the day and the workout. So I adjusted the meals I ate to fit within that number.
I started by heading out to my freezer and getting out some of that frozen type stuff that I usually eat. I then used seeing AI, an app created by Microsoft, to scan the bar codes on each box, bag, and package. Then I went online and looked up the calories in ingreedients, because I'd planned to start cooking more, but that's a subject for another post. Then, I simply refered to my notes on the calorie count for each food and ate the appropriate amount.
I also had an Apple Watch, and it tracked my calories burned, including resting and active. If my count for one day was low, I'd eat les, and if it was high, i'd give myself some leeway. I even tracked sleep to make sure I was getting a healthy amount of that, and all this data was synced into Apple Health. But, what about my weight? Sure, I could eat right, but how would I know how I was doing if I had no weight reference points?
What Could I do?
Well, obviously, I could buy myself a scale. Easy. But here's the thing. A lot of scales have screens which I can't read, because I'm blind. Oh sure, I could ask someone to read them for me, but you know, why should I have to depend on sighted people? I didn't, luckily. There are such things as talking scales. However, I searched around for them, and although I found them easily enough, I was astounded at their high price tags. There is no scale that is worth $120 in my opinion, at least for simple home use. So, I stopped my search on blindness product sites like MaxiAids and went on Amazon. I typed in talking scale and sorted by price, and bam. I found a 27 dollar Taylor Talking Scale with a 440 pound capacity and 4.1 out of 5 stars I read some of the reviews, and it seemed like a pretty good product, so I added it to my cart and kept looking. As I kept scrolling down the page, I found more and more scales that would Bluetooth to your phone and stick your measurements right into Apple Health. That really appealed to me, because hey, I'm already tracking everything else in there. That would be super easy to look at everything in one place. I read several reviews on several great scales, and I was like: "man, I got so many options." And then I was like: "Wait, wait a minute. None of these things say they talk." And indeed it was true. Neither in the product name nor the description could I find any reference to the scale I was going to buy talking. So I tried alternative searches, like talking smart scale, smart scale with voice, bluetooth talking scale, and they didn't yield much. At this point, I had to go do something and got totally distracted, eventually forgetting altogether about my search. When I did remember it, I just kind of thought that maybe I'd buy the cheap talking scale that I found and enter the readings manually. But then I thought: "Well, who the frik wants to do that?" and brushed it off to think about that problem later.
My Solution
I hadn't ended up thinking much about scales at all until recently, when I was browsing Twitter. I saw a
9-to-5 Toys Promotion
of a smart scale made by Eufy, an Anchor brand. I checked it out, and it looked really amazing. It didn't just measure weight, it calculated body fat percentage, heart rate, body mass index, bone density, and a lot more. And do you know what? It was on sale for 16.99!
I really wanted to buy it, but I still had the same problem, it didn't talk. But I thought maybe I could somehow work around that issue, so I went to read about it on Amazon. I was heartened slightly by its use description, which stated:
- Open the Eufy Life app
- Step on the scale.
- Read your data in the app or associated health service. From what I understood, it didn't even sound like you had to look at the scale, in fact it didn't even sound like the scale had a display to look at. But I was still a little skeptical, so I went to look at the app itself, to see if it was accessible. As it was downloading, I started reading some reviews, and for the most part, it looked like it was a pretty functional one. Then I came across a review that said that the reviewer, who was blind, had managed to get the scale paired with their phone, not from the app, but with a workaround of pairing it under Bluetooth settings. They said the app itself could be used all right, but there were a lot of unlabeled buttons. But the review was made in April of 2019, so I figured that the developers may have updated it. I looked at the update history and nope, there were no specific update descriptions talking about accessibility, but I figured I'd try the app out anyway. I did, and it really wasn't bad. But, of course, I didn't have the scale to make sure of that. I solved that buy ordering it figuring that if it didn't work, I'd just return it.
The Scale arrives
So, a couple days after ordering, the scale came to my door. It was in a large flat box and I unwrapped it to find the scale itself, three Triple A battereies, and a manual. Discarding the manual, I opened the battery compartment on the bottom of the unit and put the batteries in, then pressed the single button it had. I opened up the Eufy Life app and clicked add a device, and it took a couple tries of scanning, but both app and scale eventually found each other and connected.
Impressions
I really like this scale and the way it works. There are four rubber pads on it, aranged two per side of the rectangular device. You place your feet on these and it weighs you and measures all the other stuff. For best results, I've noticed that you need to be wearing nothing on your feet so the electrodes in the pads can do their work. I also noticed that you have to place the scale on a hard, stable surface, because when I tried it on my carpeted bedroom floor, the app registered my weight as 72 pounds.
To use this thing, you open its app, press the button on the scale and wait for it to show as connected on your phone, then you step on it and your results are updated in realtime. The scale is oriented with the battery compartment at the top of the rectangle, on its short side, and the power button is located there. Once there are no detected measurements for 10 seconds, the scale powers down automatically.
Wrapping Up
So, if you have a visual impairment, and you aren't looking for a scale that will destroy your bank account, then I'd recommend this one. Yes, I know I bought it on sale, but even so, you'll hardly find a better deal on a scale that you can use totally from your phone.