Body Scan is a sophisticated tool that offers an in-depth analysis of your body, assessing the fat and muscle mass across your arms, torso, and legs with high precision. Its advanced technology; however, is sensitive to skin-to-skin contact, which can interfere with the accuracy of your segmental body composition readings. Interference from your arms or legs touching other body parts during the measurement can lead to incorrect results.

Body Scan incorporates a cutting-edge skin-to-skin contact detection algorithm to address this. Developed through millions of measurements, this feature ensures unparalleled accuracy by identifying any skin-to-skin contact that occurs during the measurement process.

Inconclusive body composition result

Receiving an inconclusive result typically indicates that the measurement was performed in a manner that prevented Body Scan from accurately assessing your segmental body composition. Rather than providing an inaccurate result, we advise following our recommendations closely to achieve the most accurate recording possible.

If you receive an inconclusive result, please follow these steps:

1. Make sure you step on the scale barefoot and stay completely still during measurement.
2. Hold the handle with both hands and ensure each hand is holding the correct side marked L (Left) and R (Right). Place your thumbs on each of the top electrodes on the handle.
   Important: Body composition measurement is not possible without the handle.
   
3. Wear light clothing on your torso and legs to prevent skin-to-skin contact. Make sure your hands and your arms are not touching the skin of your torso, and your thighs are not touching each other. (See illustration below.) This cloth barrier will help to prevent skin-to-skin contact.
   Note: Wearing light clothing should have no impact on your weight measurement.
   
4. Make sure you always weigh yourself around the same time.
   Ideally, you should weigh yourself about 30 minutes after you get up, or at least three hours after working out, eating, or drinking.
5. Make sure your profile information such as height, gender, and age are entered correctly within the Withings App. To check this, select Profile within the app and then select your name under your profile picture at the top of the screen.
   Change your height, gender or age if necessary.
6. Make sure your scale is clean.
   Click here for cleaning instructions. 

Correct positioning highlighting the reduced skin-to-skin contact.

Important Notes:

• Make sure that you always use the handle when you want to take a body composition measurement. Without the handle, a body composition measurement is not possible.
• Fat mass + Bone mass + Muscle mass = 100% of the body composition. As there is water in muscle and fat, the water mass cannot be added to the other metrics when calculating the body composition.
• The Body Scan has not been tested and/or validated for usage during pregnancy. Due to its impedance technology related to the usage of limited electric currents and for precautionary purposes, we recommend that you disable impedance-based measurement capability if you are pregnant. You can do this by enabling either Weight-Only Mode or Pregnancy Mode by going to Devices > Body Scan > Modes and make sure either mode is toggled on.
  

   

What should I do if I receive body composition results but lack detailed information for each body part?

Our dedication to precision is reflected in our two-phase body composition measurement process:

1) Full-Body Composition Scan:

This initial phase scans your entire body to provide a comprehensive overview of your overall body composition. This will result in having accurate measurements in the main graph of the body composition view.

2) Targeted Segmental Analysis:

Following the full-body scan, Body Scan performs a targeted analysis of each of your five segments (limbs and torso). This will result in having advanced measurements in the Explorer mode.

To maintain this accuracy, our skin-to-skin detection algorithm separately identifies potential issues in both the full-body and segmental results. This meticulous approach underscores our commitment to delivering precise and reliable body composition data. This implies that should there be any issue with the segmental analysis, you could still receive your overall body composition results directly on the scale. The only information that might be missing would be the detailed segmental analysis within the application.

By following these guidelines and gaining an understanding of how Body Scan operates, you can maximize the accuracy and utility of your body composition measurements. To understand more about viewing your segmental body composition data, please see our dedicated article. 

Why does my body composition data fluctuate?

Body Scan derives its estimation of the body composition metrics from the analysis of your bioelectrical impedance. This method is reliable but is also dependent on your level of hydration, which can be influenced by what you drink, eat and the types of exercise you engage in. Because of this, we recommended to weigh in only once a day and always under the same conditions, typically at the same time of the day.

Other external factors, such as your posture or muscle contraction (the way your muscles move when you are physically active), can also influence the measurements and lead to up to 2% of variations in your results. With this in mind, following your monthly trend will more accurately represent the evolution of your body composition.