The energy from HLTH 2025 was incredible, and we're excited to share one of our most insightful conversations recorded live from the conference. Although the event has wrapped, the ideas discussed are setting the agenda for the year ahead.
In this episode, Dr. Tim Showalter sits down with Antoine Pivron, Head of Healthcare Solutions at Withings, the company bridging the gap between consumer-friendly design and clinical-grade data.
Withings is known for its smart scales, blood pressure monitors, and sleep trackers, but its biggest impact may be in the B2B world. Antoine details the company's strategic shift from wellness to medical, focusing on how to build devices that drive engagement for all patients—even those who aren't tech-savvy.
Tune in to explore the critical role of connected health in the new era of chronic care.
Key Topics Discussed:
From Wellness to Medical: The strategy behind Withings' evolution into a B2B clinical partner.
Beyond BMI: Why the GLP-1 and obesity care boom demands a focus on body composition, not just weight.
Engaging Every Patient: How do you design for a 75-year-old with chronic heart failure? Antoine shares simple yet powerful engagement hacks (like putting the weather on a scale).
Powering GLP-1 Programs: How Withings' ecosystem provides the data to personalize treatment, improve adherence, and prove outcomes to payers.
Making Data Actionable: Translating a flood of home health data into simple, actionable alerts and trends for busy care teams.
The Future of Home Health: Why Antoine believes "health starts at home" and that using connected technology will soon be non-negotiable for providers.
Introduction
Dr. Tim Showalter: Welcome back to Health Tech Remedy, where we explore how technology, devices, and data are transforming patient care and health systems. This is another live episode from HLTH 2025, and today we're diving into the future of connected health with one of the leaders in this space. I'm pleased to be joined by Antoine Pivron, head of healthcare solutions at Withings, the company whose connected scales, blood pressure monitors, sleep analyzers, and broader ecosystem aim to turn data from everyday measurements into clinically actionable information. Antoine's role is all about bridging consumer ease with provider rigor. Antoine, great to have you here.
Antoine Pivron: Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I'd love to start hopping right in to hear a little bit about your own background, maybe even starting before Withings and what attracted you to this general area.
From Wellness to Medical: The Genesis of Withings’ B2B Division
Antoine Pivron: I joined Withings six and a half years ago, actually, to build the B2B division. At the time, we wanted to have a very interesting shift from wellness to medical. The company exists for 16 years, so we were only focusing on wellness and the consumer world for the first 10 years. And then I joined the company to build, I was very interested in building something new and trying to understand the healthcare market, which is a tough thing. We wanted to make this shift and I was so attracted about it. And especially having something tangible in this world, having products that people are using every day with a real impact in their daily life. That's I was really interested in this.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Just to reflect on that. Withings has this interesting dual identity, because there's this background heavily rooted in consumer health, smart scales, wearables. But then your involvement is really embedding it in more clinical workflows. And how do you think about at the product level and how the system is built to serve both of those needs? What particular challenges have you faced?
Bridging Consumer Tech and Clinical Needs
Antoine Pivron: Exactly. The first thing is that it's a completely different need and a different way to integrate the device, to use the devices. We have the feeling that the consumer world—not patients, but users—they are asking a lot. They want a lot of data. They want a lot of feedback. They want to understand the trends, et cetera. You can see what is the trend with also Oura and Whoop. And there are more and more biomarkers in all of those wearables, which is great.
And it's people that are willing to use the technology. They know how to use it. They have the latest smartphones with the apps. They know how to do this.
The B2B world as a medical world is something different because we need to equip patients. They have a real condition as they need to be treated and it's not always their decision to be on treatment and to be monitored. We have to ensure that it's as easy as possible to use our devices. Especially patients, most of them are elderly people. If I take the example of CHF people, chronic heart failure monitoring programs, in average they are what, 75 years old? It's not necessarily the most tech-savvy people.
We build solutions where still we are providing connected devices—mainly to measure weight, blood pressure, and ECG. But those patients, they don't even need to use a smartphone or an app or whatever. They just need to step on the weight scale and that's it. And the data are flowing directly to the medical dashboards. Of course, there are some adaptations we have to do from the beginning when we are concepting the products. But it's more about the user experience to ensure people will use the devices as long as possible as much as they can every week. We focus a lot on the engagement and the retention in the programs. It's really our added value for B2B partners. We need to find the solutions where we ask the less to the patients. They just wear the things or just step on a weight scale. They don't do much.
Dr. Tim Showalter: So just for context, I'm a practicing clinician still. And so much of the health system inside the four walls of the hospital is built around the provider system and the infrastructure there. And it's really interesting to be here at HLTH and to hear you describe taking on this challenge and you're thinking first and foremost of the health care consumer. And I think that that's one of the key unlocks here to make it pretty straightforward. I'd like to hear a little bit about how you view the overall device ecosystem. One thing that I've been interested about in reading about Withings is that there's really an array of different smart devices. So all different sorts of data coming in. And for where you sit with the B2B marketplace, how do you view that holistic approach to the device ecosystem in terms of improving outcomes for, say, cardiovascular and other chronic conditions?
The Withings Ecosystem for Chronic Disease Management
Antoine Pivron: It's true that we have a very broad ecosystem of devices so we can collect a ton of biomarkers. We might have the biggest ecosystem of digital products I guess on the market. It means that with one single integration you can get access to all the data from those products. The products that we are using the most and distributing the most especially in B2B with our medical partners are the weight scales and the blood pressure monitor. We are very strong in the obesity care world and especially with the GLP-1 programs. We focus a lot on weight and body composition. That's really where we are very strong. And we know we have the best products on the market to ensure better engagement, better health outcomes over time. So we know that we are very strong at this.
We have a lot of use cases with the weight scales. We are also doing a lot of blood pressure monitors, especially as we say, in chronic heart failure, but also in hypertension programs or women's health, for menopause, for instance, or for pregnant women with hypertension. We are doing more and more things like this. But our view on this is that with all the other products—we have trackers, we have a sleep analyzer to detect sleep apnea, we have just launched a urine analyzer so it's something very new on the market—we start to have a huge variety of different biomarkers. And you're a physician, you know this much better than I do, but obesity is when you're obese you have a risk of so many complications and so many cardiovascular risk, that it's not just about weight, it's just about body composition. So monitoring all the other parameters might be really interesting. And as well, now we are trying to develop scores of risks so that we can give the right data to the medical teams so that they can prevent the risk much more in advance.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. And I'd love to, being at HLTH, there's so much emphasis on metabolic health and the GLP-1s have obviously been a really hot topic. Can you give us more context on how Withings intersects with supporting information about body composition and fits within care pathways built around GLP-1s?
Enhancing GLP-1 Programs with Connected Health Data
Antoine Pivron: Our biggest partners are actually the big players in the GLP-1 world, especially in the U.S. We are working with partners that have a medical view about it, and they really care about the patients, and they want to have a very precise program, and they have a true relationship with the patients, and they want long-term outcomes. We do really work with those people. What we are providing to them is that we are providing the tool to collect data at home, and so we are making the link between the patients at home and the physicians so that they can personalize the programs.
And to us, this is the key that leads to better engagement, higher retention, and then better health outcomes. Those three pillars, they're actually, it benefits the entire industry in terms of cost savings. We have a lot of studies showing that the more adherent patients on GLP-1s are, saving a lot of money for the health system over years. We really focus on also helping those obesity care program, showing the RIA model to the payers. Most of them, they also have a B2B business model where they have a contract with payers and employers. So we ask them to share the RIA model. And so they can also build their contracts based on the data around engagement, around retention or outcomes. That's really what we are providing to them.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Remarkable. And I imagine when they're looking at engagement for these chronic illnesses, or long-term interventions, it's really about sustained engagement. And can you give us a little bit more color on either what steps that you think about to ensure sustained engagement from patients, or even maybe some metrics that you may be aware of from Withings for them?
The Core of a Successful Program: Strategies for Patient Engagement
Antoine Pivron: Yeah, of course. We help the patients to build the strong habits. We want to find everything that can help them to build those habits over time so that if there is a gap in the treatment, they can still have those habits, better lifetime and better behavior. And so they can maintain the outcome during those gaps and of course over time.
We are working on a lot of different things, but we are providing a ton of data. We are providing, of course, the data of the weight and body composition, etc. The medical data from the weight scales, but we're also providing an engagement score so that the care teams, they can reach out to the patients at the right moment. If we see that the trend of using the devices is not in a good pace, they can really reach out to the patient at the right moment to ensure they are not demotivated and they can be able to maintain what was their efforts.
And we are doing so many different things for engagement. That's really something that we are doing very good. Our product team is very good at it. For instance, we have the weather on the weight scale so every time you step on it you can see the weather of the day. And we realize that it seems like a very stupid thing actually but there are a certain percentage of users stepping on the weight scale every morning to understand which clothes they will put on. It seems dumb but they're creating a habit like this.
And also especially for the obesity care world, we created some very interesting things where on the screen of the devices and especially the weight scales, we are not necessarily showing the value of the weight because we realize with our obesity care partners that quite a big part of their patients, they were quite skeptical by stepping on the weight scale because they didn't want to see the actual value of the weight. So instead of putting this value, we are sharing motivational messaging. And that helps a lot. Those very details and simple things helps a lot to create engagement and motivating patients over time.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Oh, that's fantastic. I'm picturing, for providers, you've described a landscape of lots of rich data. Can you give us more information about how you make that digestible and actionable for providers?
Making Health Data Actionable for Providers
Antoine Pivron: The thing here is that we are not directly reaching out to the care teams. We are always working with specialists and digital health programs in the field. They know exactly what their medical team and what the caregivers they need. Most of the time they are, of course, not sharing all the data. The practitioners, they can get access to all the data if they want, but there are many managing trends over time and also alerts. So if the trends are not going to the right direction, there is a notification or they are putting the patients in a red list that they need to reach out to those patients. It's not about analyzing the daily data from the patient. It's more analyzing the trends. And our partners, they are doing their best so that they give exactly the right level of information at the right moment to the caregiver so that, of course, they can save time.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I see. That makes sense. There's a couple steps of post-processing analysis there. One thing that I'd like to cover with you is the ongoing trends in technology. And so with such focus on obesity management and metabolic care and GLP-1s at this conference and generally within health technology, there's been a fair amount of discussion about body composition changes. So not just the weight numbers, but also how it impacts muscle mass and other considerations. Can you give us an overview for how Withings is approaching that?
Shifting the Focus from BMI to Body Composition Analysis
Antoine Pivron: Yeah, well, that's exactly our view on it. We're always saying it's GLP-1 treatment and obesity care program. It's not only about weight. It's more about body composition and a lot of other things. Actually, it might be linked to blood pressure, etc. Because we are using the BMI. Most people in the industry are using the BMI to assess the performance of the GLP-1s. And the BMI was created in the 18th century or 19th century, I guess. It was a mathematician in Belgium, and he did this to understand what is the average man. So it was not even to diagnose obesity. So we are using this matrix to assess the performance of one of the most amazing innovations we have in this century. So it's not only about weight, and you can see what the Lancet published in January. They provided new guidelines to diagnose clinical obesity, and it's not based on weight. It's based on body composition.
What we are trying to do is to educate people in the industry to not focus on weight but more on body composition and that's what we are doing with our partners so that the payers now they understand this and they want real outcome for their population. We see the shift, but of course it will take time. And also to me on the technology itself, the mindset should be more focused on adopting the existing technology. We are doing weight scale for body composition at home with very precise metrics for, I don't know, 15 years now or 14 years. It's not something coming or it's not an innovation. It's not new. So I think we should focus a lot our level and our energy on adopting the existing technology instead of trying to create new ones every month. That would have a huge impact on the market.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. Thank you. And I think I saw that there was a press release on Withings Intelligence. And of course, everyone's talking about AI right now. And I'm curious to get your thoughts on when you look ahead, say, in the next three to five years, because things are moving quickly, so I'd never say 10 years. How do you see AI in the analytic structure transforming how connected devices are embedded into clinical care?
The Role of AI in Accelerating Health Tech Innovation
Antoine Pivron: Of course, AI is a fantastic tool that can help to accelerate and scale everything we are doing much faster. To us, the mindset of our product team especially and the research team developing the algorithms and the products and everything, they are still working I guess with the same vision but they are using those amazing tools with AI so that they can develop what they had in mind but instead of putting three years of efforts it may be done in only three months. It's really something that of course everybody is only working with this now and especially in our teams they are trying to understand how we can accelerate our processes or develop new things, develop new scores. For us, personally, I see this more as a tool to accelerate what we're already doing. It's not a new mindset. It's just something that we can really support us in our mission. So, yeah, that's my vision on AI.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, it's amazing to think about what's ahead for Withings in terms of with the pace of innovation. And maybe just for our last question, I want to turn it a little bit to, you started off saying that you learned a lot about the American health care system, and it is pretty it's a complicated beast. But I'm curious to get your thoughts on what your area and the ecosystem of connected devices. What is it going to mean for health care overall in the next five to 10 years? And if you were sitting down here talking to a healthcare executive, what would you tell them about deploying connected devices and where the field is headed?
The Future of Healthcare: Why Health Starts at Home
Antoine Pivron: Yeah, that's a good question. We are strong believers that health starts at home. And with everything going—the number of hospitals, there's a lack of caregivers in the hospital, the lack of resources and funds in some public hospitals or even private ones—we need to find a way to monitor more people with the same amount of caregivers. And also the health system everywhere in the world was based after World War II mainly to monitor very strong diseases and but short ones. And now it's completely different. We need to monitor chronic conditions. It can start when you are 30 years old and you will have the chronic condition until you die in your 80s. So we need to adapt this way to work.
To me at some point it will be irresponsible for the caregiver to not use the technology that is here on the market because we are actually not, of course the industry need to change the ways they are monitoring people but those tools can really help to make the difference in treatment adoption or analyzing specific trends and detecting a risk. We have just had a big fundraising from the French government to build scores of risks, so it's 10 million euros, I guess. And so those scores, the purpose of it is to be able to pre-diagnose, let's say, or identify a potential risk much more in advance so that the care teams, they can really try to identify something that you cannot see if you are just visiting the doctor four times a year. So, yeah, I think at some point it's probably irresponsible to not use the existing technology.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's a remarkable trend. I think that you started off by saying health starts at home, which I think is a key insight. And who's at home? It's the patient and their family members. And I think that that's new for health system leaders to think about healthcare happening outside of the confines of the hospital. And that is a really key insight that you're enabling. So I'm really excited to see what's ahead for Withings and really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me.
Antoine Pivron: Thanks a lot. It was a pleasure to meet.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's it for this episode. Withings is clearly helping make monitoring more seamless, usable, and clinically meaningful. And for that, we're really excited about that. Really great to have so many interesting conversations at HLTH 2025. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Health Tech Remedy. And to everyone listening, be sure to like and subscribe to find out more about upcoming episodes. Thank you.
