Withings is now Nokia, announces new connected scale, the Body Cardio will measure cardiovascular health

A couple months ago, Nokia announced its intention to buy Withings, the France-based maker of digital health products. That deal closed ahead of schedule a little over a week ago, and the combined entity opened new offices in San Francisco a few days ago.

The company has been on the move, we got to check out Withings’ latest activity tracker, the Withings Go, earlier this year at CES. Last year, we did a full review of their impressively simple Activité connected watch.

Believe it or not however, Withings’ first connected products were scales. Now that the product line as expanded to cover most areas of activity, fitness tracking and health monitoring, the company just launched a new generation of connected scale, the Body Cardio.

The Body Cardio can obviously weigh you, and like some other “smart” scales, can calculate body-mass (BMI), water weight, and bone composition. Withings says the Body Cardio redefines the connected scale category because it also measures heart rate, and then, even takes that one step further.

The Body Cardio can also gauge cardio vascular health via pulse wave velocity (PWV) measurements. This basically tracks how fast your heart is pushing blood through your body’s circulatory system. By integrating other activity tracking with the Withings Health Mate app, you can see if conditions are tracking toward potential cardio vascular problems, like hypertension.

That may seem like a small feature, but cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death around the world, and many incidents are preventable. PWV is an established method used by medical professionals to examine cardiac health.

PWV works by monitoring the speed at which heartbeat-generated vibrations spread out along the arterial wall. A high PWV measurement could be an indicator of high-blood pressure or stiffening arteries.

Like all of Withings connected devices, the Body Cardio communicates with the Health Mate app (iOS and Android) which aggregates, tracks your progress, integrates, updates, and coaches you to achieve certain goals for sleep, physical activity, blood pressure, weight, and more. Another nice benefit with the Body Cardio is that you will only have to recharge it about once a year.

The Withings Body Cardio scale is available in black or white, and is currently sold exclusively at Apple Stores (the scale will work with the Android app) worldwide, or via Withings.com for $179.95. Other retailers will be added throughout the summer.

Download the Withings Health Mate app for iOS | Android