Skip to main content

Hands on: Philips Connected Health

Philips' range of health products may change your life, but only if you're prepared to wait

IFA 2024
This story is part of our coverage of IFA Berlin 2024

Philips built a stellar suite of health products with an app that advises you like a real doctor and sets achievable goals.

Is Philips the first electronics company that comes to mind when you think about health and fitness products? Perhaps not, but it’s building a platform of connected devices that monitor your well-being and an evolving app that will set reasonable, achievable goals to help alter your lifestyle for the better.

Recommended Videos

The company launched the Philips Connected Health device range at the end of last year, but the products have only just gone on sale, so we jumped at the chance to see them first-hand in early September. The range consists of a connected watch, smart scales, a blood pressure monitor, a heart rate monitor, and a body temperature monitor. All operate together and send data to a central app called HealthSuite.

Philips complete range does everything you need.

The watch is, if you’ll forgive the pun, at the heart of all this. It has a metal body and a soft silicone strap, with a heart rate monitor on the back, and a circular monochrome screen on the front. It’s not touch-controlled, so you interact with the system using gestures on the oversized bezel. The display needs unlocking with three taps on the bottom of the bezel before you can do anything. At the top of the display is a home-style button icon to access the menu, and scrolling through options requires a sideways swipe along the base of the screen. Unlocking the watch is a bit fiddly, but it worked every time we tried, and although you’re not touching big buttons on the relatively small screen, interacting with the watch was easy. However, the bigger your fingers and poorer your eyesight, the harder this will get.

It’s not a smartwatch, so there are no notifications from your phone, and it doesn’t need to be connected all the time. It tracks movement, sleep, and calorie burn, plus it’ll automatically recognize when you start exercising. The heart rate monitor fires up periodically to take a measurement, which means the battery life isn’t that impressive — about four days according to Philips. It’s not the most stylish watch, either, with a look best described as conservative, bordering on the anonymous. Philips is charging $250 for the Health Watch, which is not all that different from the price of most Android Wear smartwatches, so it’s no bargain.

Big plans for HealthSuite

Sounds bad? It’s not, because of the ecosystem Philips is creating around the watch. We measure our health and fitness metrics because we want to be healthier, but rarely do we get much feedback, advice, or motivation from these tools. More than that, if you have a chronic condition, want to seriously lose weight, or have been told by a doctor to change your lifestyle; building a complete picture of your condition using many different data points is essential to manage all this.

Philips’ complete range does everything you need. You wear the watch all day and night, then use the connected scale weekly, and depending on your goals, mix in the blood pressure monitor, more detailed heart rate readings, and temperature measurements too. All this data is collected in the simple HealthSuite app and presented in easy-to-understand graphs. Even at this stage, the data could be invaluable to a doctor, or to help motivate you, but Philips has something even better in mind.

The next stage is to take the data collected from the devices and feed it into an extension of the app, where programs made with the help of doctors and psychologists are generated to help you achieve your goals. We saw a demo in action. For example, the app will understand you may need to move more, sleep longer, and lose some weight. It will then set achievable goals and a plan for you to follow. The app will check in periodically to see how you’re doing, and if you’re not keeping up, it will crucially ask why, just like a doctor would. Through pre-generated intelligent responses, it will suggest new ways to approach the challenge, in order to increase motivation.

Philips understands that by simply saying, “Lose weight, fatty,” then ordering you to walk 15,000 steps a day and eat a carrot once in a while, no one will succeed. Instead, the app will see how much you move and up the goal incrementally, and provided you log your calorie and food intake, it’ll suggest alternative meals and other healthier eating options too.  Phillips’ system wants to help you change and knows how to make a plan you’ll be able to follow. It’s a sensible approach that may bring about a true, lasting lifestyle alteration.

Get motivated, Philips

The Philips Connected Health ecosystem is definitely aimed at people who need to make vital health-related changes, mature people, and those who require more than a simple Fitbit band on their wrist to motivate them. The watch may not be as flashy as an Apple Watch, but it doesn’t have to be. The other products may not be especially desirable; but they all do very specific jobs, and the app provides the value.

Well, it will provide value. Philips says the next stage of the app’s evolution described above will launch next year, so you’ll have to wait to get the most benefit from any Philips Connected Health product you may buy now. It’ll be subscription based as well, so be prepared for a monthly charge to get all the features we’ve talked about. The range of devices along with Philips intention to add other connected products like its air purifier, smart toothbrush, and baby products to the ecosystem; combined with the emerging plan for the app is exciting; but the timeline is slow, something that seems to have plagued the entire range of products since the beginning. Perhaps Philips can use a motivational app to help reach its goal a little faster, because we can see people really benefiting from this suite of devices.

Highs

  • Health Watch is easy to use
  • Complete range of tools covers most health bases
  • Single app to keep track of data
  • Grand plans for the near future

Lows

  • Expensive
  • New app features not out until next year
Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
How does Garmin measure stress, and is it really accurate?
Garmin Vivomove Sport dial close up. Credits: Garmin official.

Garmin watches are known for their robust activity tracking, but that's not all these fitness watches can do. Over the years, the company has been adding wellness features to its lineup of watches. These new health-focused metrics allow people to analyze their fitness and identify outside factors affecting their performance. One such factor is stress, which is something Garmin watches actively measures.
But you may be wondering—exactly how does Garmin measure stress? In this article, we break down how Garmin measures stress and delve into the accuracy of this metric. Should you trust your stress score? Read on to find out.

Is Garmin's stress score accurate?

Read more