Pivotal Living fitness band and smart scale reviewed: $12 a year, well spent

There are few fitness trackers under $50, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find many good ones in that price range. There are even fewer with subscription plans, but Pivotal Living is incorporating both of these strategies into its devices. The company’s band is a basic tracker that monitors your activity and sleep, giving you full access to its app for the small price of $12 per year. The company has recently come out with its first companion device, the $40 Smart Scale, which is quite affordable compared to other weighty scales that can cost up to $150.

Pivotal Living’s mission is to make activity devices accessible for those who need them most. So it makes sense for the company to have both trackers and scales working together and to offer affordable prices for each. According to the Food Research and Action Center, lower-income neighborhoods have fewer physical activity resources than higher-income neighborhoods, meaning they don’t have as much access to parks, recreation centers, and other areas that encourage physical activity. While Pivotal Living’s devices lack the advanced features that would appeal to serious athletes, they combine functionality and affordability well enough to motivate those in need of a new way to change their activity and dietary habits.

Design: No unnecessary bells and whistles

Pivotal Living kept things simple with the tracker: it’s a black wristband with a rectangular OLED display that sits on top of your wrist. On its right side is one physical button, which you press to scroll through time, steps, distance, calories, and goal percentage on the screen. It has a snap closure and isn’t hard to put on, and otherwise it just kind of sits there—there’s nothing extraordinary about the band, but you get what you pay for.

The Smart Scale mimics this simplicity. It’s a square pedestal with rounded edges that looks similar to Fitbit’s Aria and Withing’s Smart Body Analyzer—but then again they all just look like geometric stepping stools. The scale has a small display at the top-center of the square that lights up when you step on it and shows your weight. It runs on four AAA batteries, so you won’t have to worry about recharging your smart scale every couple of days either. The band, however, will last up to seven days, but that’s still on-par with other wristbands like the Fitbit Charge.

Both devices connect to the app via Bluetooth, so setup takes nothing more than a few minutes. After making a Pivotal Living account, you press the button on the tracker when prompted within the app, and it detects the wristband automatically. The scale currently only works with a new version of the app available only to iOS users for now. It appears along with the tracker in your device list, and you connect it by standing on the scale, tapping the Bluetooth icon in the app, and pairing the devices. According to a Pivotal Living representative, the updated version of the app should be available for Android and iOS users sometime in December.

The Pivotal Living Band is a bare-bones fitness tracker.

Valentina Palladino

The Pivotal Living Band is a bare-bones fitness tracker. Valentina Palladino

Its OLED display shows very little on each screen.

Valentina Palladino

Its OLED display shows very little on each screen. Valentina Palladino

Pressing its side button lets you scroll between the time, steps, distance, calories, and goal percentage.

Valentina Palladino

Pressing its side button lets you scroll between the time, steps, distance, calories, and goal percentage. Valentina Palladino

Its OLED display shows very little on each screen. Valentina Palladino

Pressing its side button lets you scroll between the time, steps, distance, calories, and goal percentage. Valentina Palladino

It’s made of a silicone-like material that’s just stretchy enough to be comfortable and retain its shape at the same time.

Valentina Palladino

The nodes on the underside of the device, for charging.

Valentina Palladino

The band snaps closed, making it easy to put on and take off.

Valentina Palladino

It doesn’t have a heartrate monitor, so you can wear the Life Tracker as loose or as tight as you want.

Valentina Palladino

The module sits slightly awkwardly on top of your wrist, but it’s not obtrusive.

Valentina Palladino

The Smart Scale is also basic in style, yet elegant for the price.

Valentina Palladino

The logo sits at the bottom of the scale.

Valentina Palladino

These nodes designate where you put your feet when you stand on the scale.

Valentina Palladino

The display is bright and turns on automatically when the scale feels you standing on it.

Valentina Palladino

Features: Life with and without a membership

First, let’s explain the Pivotal Living membership. Currently, it’s attached to the wristband, so when you buy the band for $12, you automatically get full access to the band’s features and Pivotal Living app. During the next 12 months, you’ll receive app updates for free, and at the end of the year you’ll have the chance to “upgrade” to a new tracker. Pivotal has plans to release an updated device every year (how different that new tracker will be is unclear), so you can choose to keep your band or get a new one with the next $12-membership continuation price.

If you don’t want to continue your subscription, you don’t have to pay again. You get to keep your band and it will function as usual, tracking all your activity throughout the day. But you will not be able to access the app, as it requires an active member’s login username and password. While being able to keep and use the tracker is convenient, keep in mind that without the app, you won’t be able to offload activity data anywhere or look back on previous days, weeks, and months of data. Used in this way, the band becomes more of a pedometer rather than a device to help you meet long-term fitness goals.

That being said, the wristband alone tracks steps, calories, and distance. Goal percentage is also displayed on the band, but that’s tied to the app, so it won’t show up if you don’t have an active membership. The band has a vibration motor inside as well, so you can set silent alarms and inactivity alerts to buzz throughout the day. While the inactivity alert isn’t “smart,” as in it won’t sense when you’ve been sitting for too long and jolt you up, I did appreciate its customization. I set mine to vibrate every hour on weekdays between 8am and 5pm.

You can choose to set a natural wake-up alarm or an “intelligent” alarm, depending on how much trust you have in the band. The natural alarm lets you pick a time for the tracker to buzz you out of your slumber, while the intelligent alarm wakes you up during your lightest period of sleep. Jawbone’s newest trackers have a similar feature, using a short window of time during which it could buzz you awake if it senses you are in light sleep.

Sleep tracking isn’t automatic, though—you must press the band’s button twice to enter sleep mode and twice again when you wake up to exit. It monitors how many times you woke up during the night, as well as how long you were in deep sleep, and “sleep quality,” which seems to be based on movement alone. Unless they have a built-in heart rate monitor, most trackers focus on movement to assess sleep quality, so take this metric with a grain of salt.

With the scale, there’s not much interaction involved on your part—just stand on it and let the device do the rest. It takes about five to ten seconds for the scale to weigh you and another five seconds to assess your body fat percentage. Those two metrics appear on the scale’s display, and you can see more, including your BMI and lean mass, from the app. The scale can record stats for up to 16 different users, so if everyone in your family has a Pivotal Living tracker, you only need one scale for the entire household. Using the scale and the tracker in conjunction with each other, connected to the same Pivotal Living account, is meant to help you reach a new health and weight goal—the tracker records what you do during the day (including diet), and the scale reports back to you if your actions have been progressing you toward your goal.

Pivotal Living app: Your activity hub, now with MyPlate integration

The Pivotal Living companion app for Android and iOS is up there with Fitbit’s app in terms of design and ease of use. It’s bright and colorful, showing your fitness stats on the homepage with bubbles in a friendly shape that resembles a flower. In the center is the amount of time you’ve been active that day with circles around it for step count, weight, calories burned, sleep time, water consumption, and nutrition. Just above that is a horizontal calendar of sorts, letting you swipe back to see data from previously tracked days.

Scrolling down on the homepage shows you the same stats, with sleep and steps highlighted with their own individual graphs. This reveals how well you slept during different parts of the evening and when you walked the most throughout the day. With hydration and weight, you’ll notice a small arrow on the left side of the screen. You can tap and drag this to the right to record things like how many ounces of water you’ve drunk or any weight changes if you don’t have the Smart Scale but still want to keep track of your weight.

Pivotal Living has you create an account or log in to begin setup.

Pivotal Living has you create an account or log in to begin setup.

Before setting up the device, the app gives you some diagrams to show you how the tracker works.

Before setting up the device, the app gives you some diagrams to show you how the tracker works.

These drawings help guide you through setup and first use.

These drawings help guide you through setup and first use.

Before setting up the device, the app gives you some diagrams to show you how the tracker works.

These drawings help guide you through setup and first use.

Making an account is super quick and easy.

The app homepage; the new version for iOS has a menu bar that slides out from the right.

Profile settings and activity goals can be changed at any time.

Customize the notifications you want to get and make sure your devices are paired correctly.

Sleep tracking shows your sleep quality as a curvy line graph with surrounding individual metrics.

Step tracking shows you how much you moved compared to other days and how your day compares to personal and friends’ averages.

The MyPlate icon shows how much dairy, grains, protein, vegetables, and fruits you’ve eaten that day compared to the daily recommended amount.

The weight page lets you know how close you are to reaching your weight goal as well as your body fat percentage, lean body mass, basal metabolic rate, and BMI.

You can get more information on these stats when you press the small information icon at the top of the weight page.

Tapping on any of the circles shows you line and bar graphs that lay out your data in a more detailed way. It makes sense for the app to highlight graphs for sleep and steps on the homepage, as they are arguably the most useful metrics. The detailed weight page is also helpful, showing you current weight and goals, body fat percentage, lean body mass in pounds, basal metabolic rate (or how many calories you would burn while sitting around all day), and your BMI.

There’s a small information icon at the top of that page that tells you how each measurement is calculated, and I appreciate that the BMI page has a disclaimer explaining that your BMI may not accurately reflect your fitness level since many athletes or body builders may register a BMI over the healthy limit even if they’re generally healthy (due to more weight from muscle rather than fat). I wish the app had more information like this. Advice on things like how to reach any one of your goals (steps per day, weight loss, etc) would make it easier for users to know how they can push themselves. This was one of our favorite aspects of Jawbone’s trackers—their app’s Smart Coach learns your habits and suggests small things you can do to be healthier each day.

The only bubble on Pivotal Living’s app homepage you’ll want to interact with regularly is the nutrition circle. The company partnered with the USDA to incorporate MyPlate diet tracking into the app. Under “nutrition,” you’ll find a plate icon breaking down how many servings of fruits, vegetables, proteins, grains, and dairy you should be getting every day. Below, you can add ounces or cups (depending on the type of nutrient) of each as you consume them throughout the day. It’s a simplistic way of keeping track of your food intake compared to diet tracking apps like MyFitnessPal, which have extensive catalogs of specific foods from numerous brands that you can choose from to add to each meal.

I like the detailed approach of MyFitnessPal, but it can be tedious to account for every little thing you put into your mouth each day. It’s frustrating if you can’t find the exact brand of oatmeal you had for breakfast. The MyPlate method takes away a lot of that meticulousness, but it still gives you an umbrella view of your diet—did you eat twice as many grains today as proteins? How many vegetables did you eat during the week? Maybe you need to eat more fruits and vegetables and cut back on dairy and grains—that’s something this plate method can tell you with little work on your part.

The only problem I experienced was a syncing issue between the band and the app. One day after not syncing the band for a good 24 hours, I attempted to transfer my data from the band to the app to no avail. While the app indicated that the band synced properly, no data was showing up in the bubbles for the current day and the day before. I tried a few options from Pivotal’s support page, including turning the band off then on again and resetting the time on the band. The only thing that I found to remedy this issue was to disconnect the band from my account (essentially unpairing it via Bluetooth) and reconnecting it again. Unfortunately, all my activity data for the previous day and a half was lost after that. Pivotal Living’s tech support explained that resetting the time causes all of the band’s current data to be wiped, so be mindful of that if you ever have to correct the band’s time. Tech support also recommends logging out of the app, resetting your device’s Bluetooth connection, and then logging back in to the app and trying to sync again.

No more excuses

Pivotal Living has done a good job making a duo of fitness products that work well together and remain incredibly affordable. The band does everything you’d absolutely need an activity tracker to do if you are looking to move more, eat better, or lose weight. The Smart Scale is consistent in weighing and measuring your BMI, body fat percentage, and lean mass, and it will show you even the slightest change in your body when it happens. My main complaint is the intermittent issues with app syncing—to avoid this, I found syncing the band with your smartphone at least once a day provided the best results. Overall, the devices work well together and present your activity information clearly in the app; the only thing I would add is something like Jawbone’s Smart Coach to provide advice on how to achieve activity or weight goals.

If you’re wary about Pivotal Living’s membership plan, you’re likely not alone. But put it into perspective before discounting it: you’ll pay more per year for a Spotify or Netflix membership than you will for Pivotal Living. In the scheme of things, $12 each year is a small price to pay for full use of the app, and $40 for the Smart Scale is only slightly more expensive than “dumb” scales while being much more affordable than other Wi-Fi weighers. If you were to get both to start a New Year’s resolution to get healthier, it’ll set you back $52—you’d pay $200 to get the same products from Fitbit ($80 Flex band and the $130 Aria scale).

I see the Pivotal Living Band and Smart Scale being one of two things to customers: for some, they could be their long-term fitness power couple, helping them reach a new activity or weight goal that they’ve been avoiding for any number of reasons. For others, they could be gateway devices—after six months of using the Life Tracker, some may find that their more active lifestyle would be better suited by a device that has workout tracking or a heart rate monitor or even a built-in GPS. Either way, Pivotal Living’s barrier to entry is low, and its devices provide a lot of value for the money, making them intriguing choices for anyone who needs to start leading a healthier lifestyle and isn’t sure where to start.