Skulpt may bring back its handheld muscle and body fat scanner

An email from Skulpt landed in my inbox this week, and it suggests the company may be thinking about getting back into hardware. Skulpt stopped selling its muscle scanners years ago, but it is now asking former customers whether they would be interested in buying a new device.

That caught my attention because Skulpt was one of the first devices I reviewed back when the site was still very new. More than a decade later, there is still surprisingly little on the market that does quite what Skulpt did.

Skulpt is testing whether people still want one

The email sent to former customers is refreshingly direct. Skulpt says it stopped selling its devices years ago, but notes that a lot of people never stopped using them. It is now gauging whether those customers would be interested if the company built a new device.

The company simply says that responses will help it decide what to do next. And that people who express interest will be among the first to hear if a new product moves forward. So this is not confirmation that Skulpt has a finished device sitting somewhere waiting to launch.

There still isn’t much else like it

I reviewed the original Skulpt Aim back in 2015. This was a strange little device then, and it remains unusual even now.

Rather than sitting on your wrist or measuring your entire body from a set of scales, Skulpt was placed directly against individual muscles. It used Electrical Impedance Myography, or EIM, to estimate muscle quality and body fat in specific areas of the body.

You could measure areas such as your biceps, triceps, quads, calves, abs and shoulders separately. That gave it a very different purpose from a conventional body composition scale. That’s because you could track how particular parts of your body changed instead of relying on a single overall body fat percentage.

The company later followed Aim with the smaller Skulpt Chisel. It removed the built-in display and shifted more of the experience to the phone, but the core idea remained the same.

There were drawbacks. Placement had to be reasonably consistent, readings could move around if you measured a slightly different spot, and judging the absolute accuracy of the numbers was never straightforward.

The hardware had its quirks as well. I eventually ended up writing a separate piece about fixing the battery problem on my Skulpt Aim after the original unit started having trouble holding a charge.

Our takeaway

The concept of this device has aged surprisingly well. Smart scales have become much more sophisticated, and some now provide segmental body composition estimates. But a handheld consumer device designed specifically for measuring individual muscles is still unusual.

A modern version of the device could also benefit from everything that has changed since Aim appeared. Better connectivity, improved battery technology and a much more capable smartphone app could make the experience far smoother than it was in 2015.

Whether Skulpt actually builds one is another question. At this stage the company is only asking former customers whether they would be interested, so there is no guarantee that a new scanner will make it beyond the idea stage.