A nice long title to sum up the latest gadget in our household. The other week, I decided to try and work out why our body fat scales wouldn’t measure body fat anymore, so I took them apart. That’s when they stopped measuring body weight as well… I think it was caused by all the wires falling out. So I was tasked with replacing them and when I saw the bargain that was the “Homedics 9126 MIBody USB PC Body Analyser Scales”. The promise of being able to transfer all the readings it takes to my PC for further analysis was way too tempting and so the order was placed.
On arrival it looked quite posh… very sturdly glass construction and it even had special ‘carpet feet’ attachments for accurate measurments on carpet. You do need to download the manual from www.body-manager.com if you want to know how to do anything other than a basic weigh-in… even the instructions for setting the clock aren’t supplied in the box. Once you’ve set it up though, transferring to the supplied USB memory stick is easy peasy with just one button press.
Sadly though, the next part is where the scales are let down. The body manager software is quite poor. It locks itself to a specific size on your screen, and prevents you from exporting the data for use in other applications. It appears to store the data in a Microsoft Access file which is password protected… I’ll have to work on that! My biggest gripe however is that if I upload all the data from the memory stick in to the software, then when Vicky logs on to the PC the data is not available for her….. so loading data requires separate transfers from the memory stick for each user on the computer. Pain in the bum.
Putting that aside, for most people I reckon it is fine. Your data is presented as a nice table
letting you switch between preferred units of stones, pounds or kilograms. You can also display your results as a graph which are quite basic but at least give you an idea of your statistics’ trends. Usefully, you get your weight, BMI, body fat%, body muscle%, body water%, visceral fat rating (the fat around your internal organs) and your BMR measured in kcal which I believe to be the total amount of calories your body needs per day in order to perform just the basic functions. Overall the scales are nice and seem to work exactly as described. My only hope is that they release the software as open source so I can go and dabble myself and produce some better software which does what I want it to do. Homedics… are you listening?
