Withings BeamO is shaping a smartwatch-free future

If you feel like you sometimes take wearables and what they can do for granted — it’s no small task to pack enough sensors to track your heart health, blood-oxygen levels, and body temperature into something compact and stylish enough to fit on your wrist, let alone a finger.

And the benefits of those breakthroughs, both in terms of utility and hardware sales, are clearly novel enough to fight over. Apple’s current legal tussle with medical device maker Masimo over how the Apple Watch measures your blood-oxygen levels is an excellent current example.

But even if a watch can know so much about you, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s learning those facts in the most accurate way. Experts have concluded that, while useful, there are still too many unknowns that need to be filled in to verify the accuracy of a wearable’s measurements. They put convenience over the demands of medical diagnosis. At CES 2024, Withings, creator of smartwatches, scales, and other health and wellness devices, proposed an alluring alternative. It’s called BeamO, a “multiscope” that puts a bundle of sensors into a handheld device you can use on yourself and your family members, rather than wear on your body, and it might thread the needle on convenience and accuracy wearables have largely missed.

Withings

What does BeamO do?

BeamO looks a bit like a flatter, sleeker version of Withings’ older Thermo, a contact-free thermometer designed to be used just by pointing and swiping it across your forehead. BeamO’s vastly expanded capabilities are the key difference.

Livia Robic, BeamO’s product manager, tells Pocket-lint that the device was primarily designed to “target families,” and be a product that “you can easily use on yourself or others.” The dream, according to Robic, was to replace the thermometer many families already have in their bathroom cabinet, the kind you might have a memory of your mother or grandmother sticking under your tongue, with something that can account for even more aspects of your day-to-day health.

Not just your body temperature, but heart and lung health too, in a device slim enough to fit in your pocket, with the ability to store medical information for eight separate people.

How does BeamO work?

BeamO includes “four sensors for taking four types of measurements,” Robic explains, “and all of these measurements are synced over to your app.” Besides temperature measurements, BeamO includes a medical-grade ECG (electrocardiogram), an oximeter for measuring blood-oxygen levels and checking oxygen saturation, and a digital stethoscope for listening to your heart and lungs.

All of this functionality has existed in separate devices previously, some as wearables that Withings sells like the ScanWatch 2, and others as singular measurement tools like the BPM Core. The difference with BeamO is that it combines them in an all-in-one device, accommodating unique ways of taking each measurement for more accuracy.

For body temperature, that’s a slow swipe across an artery on your forehead. You can measure heart rate and blood oxygen levels by holding two fingers on the sides of the BeamO for several seconds. And listening to heart and lung sounds, BeamO’s most unique skill, includes hands-on instructions that guide you through the process of finding the right spots on your torso.

“If you want to listen to heart or lung sounds, we’ll tell you where to place the BeamO on the device’s screen,” Robic says. “The technology of this stethoscope records mechanical movements into digital sounds via a membrane inside.” In other words, the handheld device acts as a sort of highly sensitive microphone that can pick up different internal sounds depending on where you point it.

Combined, you can get a fuller picture of your health in the Withings Health Mate app and share it with your doctor. Robic says you can even share a link that can give your general practitioner a live view of your heart rate and other stats while you take a reading without the need for extra software. “We want to be independent of the software doctor’s use, and instead work in parallel,” Robic says. That makes BeamO useful for doctors if you decide to share your information, but still technically a consumer device.

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