Give a patient a GLP-1 prescription and send them home, and there is a decent chance the drug outlives their commitment to it. Six-month retention runs at around 45 per cent, by the estimate of a company sitting on data from more than 600,000 GLP-1 patients. 

Wrap the same drug in a coaching service and a set of connected devices feeding data back to a care team, and that figure climbs to 93 per cent. The molecule doesn’t change. The system around it is the thing that makes the difference.

The numbers come from Antoine Pivron, vice president of Withings Health Solutions, the B2B division created seven years ago inside the French company that pioneered the connected scale in 2009. GLP-1 work now accounts for around 70 per cent of that division’s revenue, and the patient base it equips is, as he puts it, the size of Copenhagen. 

Pivron spoke to Unfiltered at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam, days after Withings announced it was joining the Novo Nordisk Partner Platform, the drugmaker’s curated library of digital health solutions for weight-management programmes.

He is more honest about the system than most executives selling into it. French doctors, he argues, earn more the more meetings they book, not the more people they heal. Healthcare, on his account, is the last industry whose stakeholders aren’t incentivised on outcomes. 

His, and Withings’s answer to that perverse incentive runs through the bathroom: a urine reader that sits in the toilet, a scale that will start flagging hypertension risk via a firmware update and monitoring so frictionless that an 80-year-old heart failure patient never needs to open an app. Whether Europe’s payers will follow America’s is the part he can influence but not control.

You’ve launched quite a few new products over the last 12 months. Which one was the most interesting?

From my personal point of view, the one that is actually completely new and still kind of a weird thing on the market, we have a urine analyser. It’s called U-Scan, and it’s something you put in the toilet, and 10 seconds after it, you have the data in your app. So imagine how we can reinvent the patient experience with that. It’s very hard for us to market it because it looks like a pebble. Nobody understands what it is when they are seeing it. So that’s one of the big challenges.

But the one that will have the biggest impact is where we are the strongest, in the obesity world, either for consumers or in B2B. We have launched a new weight scale dedicated to GLP-1 patients, to better track their body composition as a segmental body composition. This is where, really, as a product, we master. We were the first company in the world in 2009 to invent the connected weight scale. At the time, not a lot of people understood exactly the purpose of such a product, but now we’re the leader in this space, and this is the product that drives the biggest revenue for the company. So this one will have a very big impact for the consumers and for the company as well.

Why is urine analysis so important? What are the potential benefits to my health?

First thing, there is psychology. When you feel that there is something wrong in your body, a lot of people are ashamed to say it in person, even to the doctors. When the doctors are saying, “Oh, there might be a problem, you should go to a lab”, I don’t have the exact numbers, but a lot of people are not going to the labs. They are afraid of it, or the experience is bad, they are ashamed. It’s something we have discussed with the pharma groups, with a lot of doctors. They are doing prescriptions, but it actually does not follow the right path after. Or they are not seeing the patients any more.

So imagine a world where you are at home, and you don’t even feel something, but there is a device that tells you: actually, the trend is not going in the right direction. Even if you are not feeling it now, it might be a bad thing for you in two weeks. And you directly have the data in your app. 

People are educated about themselves and their health, and what brings good trends or bad trends to their body. So with this product, we can detect UTIs, maybe chronic kidney disease, something like this. It’s about helping people to better understand themselves, get the data before there is actually something that is going wrong. So it’s prevention.

And it can be also monitoring. If they are on drugs, they can be sure things are going the right way, and sharing that data with the caregivers. When we are monitoring someone, they can adapt the programme, the dosages of the drug. So the impact is for the patient, for the caregivers, because they can monitor more people from home than what they are doing today. And also it’s shaking a little bit the industry and the different stakeholders, because it’s shaking the responsibilities and the way we are working together. I’m sure there will be a lot of labs companies that will be very interested to embrace the technology and to find the right way to work together. And I’m sure there will be others that will be very afraid of us.

What can’t it do yet that you feel confident it might be able to in the future?

The main dream, you can potentially imagine in a few years, not next year, that it’s becoming a contraceptive product. I mean, I’m dreaming very far. Because if you can help women to understand their cycles, when they ovulate and everything, then maybe contraception, but also to understand where there is fertility. That may be an amazing thing. I think it will have a lot of impact, and it will help a lot of people. But it will take time.

How important is it that you don’t have to do anything once it’s there?

That’s the most important part when we are talking about connected devices. To give you a very concrete example, we are working a lot with chronic heart failure patients, so they are remotely monitored. In Germany and in France, it’s reimbursed by the social security. Those people are around 75, 80 years old, so it’s not necessarily tech-savvy people. 

What we have built is solutions where it’s preconfigured when they arrive home, and they just have to put the weight scale on the floor and step on it. There is no app, no WiFi, no installation, no nothing. There is a cellular network inside, built into the product. It shares directly the data to the caregiver, and the patient just has to step on the weight scale, wear the watch, take a measure with the blood pressure monitor.

And this adoption is key, because the moment you are asking people to change their habits or to perform a specific test that they are not comfortable with, they will not adopt the technology. 

Looking at the connected health home, how far could that go? 

Let me give you some context on my view of the European system today. In Europe, and I will take the example of France, the doctors earn more the more they are booking meetings. It’s not the more people they heal. When you think about it, that’s maybe the last industry in the world where stakeholders are not incentivised on KPIs. I don’t know if, as a patient, I feel comfortable, and I think it’s fair, that the people that are caring about me are not incentivised about the outcomes. So the first thing we have to do is to redefine how we are defining success and KPIs.

I was in a very interesting meeting on Monday, and a former Irish member of the Health Ministry told me something very clear. It’s like, you know, behaviours follow money. So if you don’t change the way we distribute the money, of course, doctors, they will not change their way to do things. And I think it’s a very, very important part, specifically in Europe. We can learn a lot from the value-based care model in the US.

Where we have a part to play here is that we are creating an ecosystem where they are getting access to all the data of the people that are just living their normal life. Just ask them to urinate, to sleep in their bed where we have a sleep analyser or just to step on a weight scale every morning. 

So far you have scales, U-Scan, a sleep device. What else could be added?

We just acquired a company in the respiratory space [Biosency, a Rennes-based respiratory monitoring specialist; the acquisition was announced on 22 June 2026] to add specific algorithms in our watches to detect respiratory failure. So we are going to increase more and more, still in the same kind of form factor and easiness to use, but more and more medical data and measurements.

We’re already working on a new version of some of our products to understand, for instance, the air quality, the impact of the light on your sleep cycles, the impact of the noise on your sleep quality. So it’s always about getting all of this information and providing the right little bit of information to educate people and helping them to improve a specific space. So it can go very far, really.

In the coming months, if you step on the weight scale, we are going to update the firmware, like a Tesla, we are going to improve the capabilities of the products by firmware updates. Where, just by stepping on the weight scale, we will tell you if you are at risk of having hypertension, diabetes or heart failure. 

We received a grant of 10 million euros from the French government to do so. So we are already putting a lot of money in this. And again, it’s a very simple gesture, and we will be able to share this with the consumers, but my role is to share this with the caregivers, so that they can better understand the patients and orientate them in the right path.

One thing we want to keep in mind, and it’s also about retention and engagement, we want to be sure we ask as less as possible things for people to use the products. We are really focussing on a non-invasive approach. We don’t do labs ourselves, and I’m not sure we are going to go that direction, because the retention and the user experience today with this is not at the level of what we want to reach. Maybe it’s the future.

You’ve got some pretty amazing products that can do wonderful things in people’s houses, and so have lots of other people. And yet, from a societal point of view, not many people are using them. Why aren’t more people measuring more stuff? 

I’d say it’s access. Today, and I come back on the system, in the GLP-1 space, you have a patient and a drug. Most of the patients, they are just on their own at home after they went to Boots or to the pharmacies, and they are just by themselves with the drug. The retention rate at six months is around 45 per cent, I guess. So it’s very bad. Those numbers are changing every time, but it’s a good ballpark. This model of care, where you have the caregiver there, the patient at home, and a drug, it doesn’t work any more.

What we have seen with a partner, and I think that should be the new standard of care, is the drug, a service, and the data. And with this triptych, we have seen transformational outcomes. So, a service could be a digital weight loss programme that is prescribing the drug to the patients and helping the patients around nutrition, activity, and they are adapting the dosage and the content of the programmes based on the data. We are the data part of the triptych. We have seen a retention at six months at 93 per cent.

I’m telling you this just to understand the size of it: it’s on a database of at least 600K patients now that are under GLP-1 and using our products. So it’s not a clinical trial on 300 participants. So I think it’s access. And in Europe, we need to show this to the payers, we need to change the standard of care. And that’s why we announced the partnership with Novo Nordisk on Monday. It’s directly linked to that topic.

How significant is the GLP-1 phenomenon to Withings?

It’s massive. I created the B2B division seven years ago, and if we are here today, it’s thanks to the GLP-1 wave, because we used to equip the diabetes prevention programmes. They switched to GLP-1 and especially in GLP-1, you need to educate people, you need to motivate them, and you need to share the right data to the caregivers if you want this to work. 

So we have a tremendous dynamic in this field. I think it’s representing, for the B2B team, so my team, both in Europe and in the US, 70 per cent of our revenue. It is massive. We have equipped now more than half a million patients. So it’s the size of Copenhagen, it is an entire city. It’s at scale now.

What’s the actual commercial and financial opportunity for you? How good could it be if you get things right?

We are today the leader in the B2B space to provide the tools to collect data for the digital health programmes. And we want to do more than this. We are not selling weight scales. We are selling tools to better engage, better motivate, and maintain the patient in the programmes the longer as possible. So the payers in the US are not seeing us any more as a cost, but as a cost saver. And that’s a big shift. I’m trying to bring that to Europe now, which is kind of tough, but we’ll go there.