This seems pretty retarded. Firstly weight is not a measure of health and weight loss is not the goal (you can improve fitness without changing weight, just shifting weight from fat mass to muscle mass).
Secondly, Who can't remember how much they weighed last time they weighed themselves? It's such a pitifully simple piece of information where small variances are inconsequential. If you weigh about 110, and your ideal weight is about 85, you hardly need to know historically what your weight was.
Thirdly, the best measure of "weight loss" is how you feel, not how much you weigh.
I can see merit in recording something but I think weight is the wrong metric, or maybe weight isn't an appropriate metric when taken in isolation.
Perhaps if it were weight correlated with mood, diet, time (of month? day? year?) or various life events then it'd be worthwhile.
Perhaps sending a text: "110kg :S pizza" indicating you're 110kg, feeling stressed and the last thing you ate was pizza.
If the "request for information" SMS were sent out at some sort of "random sampling" time, then you could probably build some sort of useful statistical model based on mood and food consumption correlating to fluctuations in weight then use the feedback to reduce weight over time.
To your first point -- some people do need to control their weight (or even lose weight), not everyone is in the same category with regards to health/weight/etc., And to be quite honest, I'm pretty sure last time I saw my doctor they told me "it'd be a good idea / healthy to lose X pounds..." -- that's fairly cut and dry to me, I need to lose some weight -- this service is just a method of tracking that progress while offering up helpful advice along the way.
Secondly, Who can't remember how much they weighed last time they weighed themselves? It's such a pitifully simple piece of information where small variances are inconsequential. If you weigh about 110, and your ideal weight is about 85, you hardly need to know historically what your weight was.
Thirdly, the best measure of "weight loss" is how you feel, not how much you weigh.
I can see merit in recording something but I think weight is the wrong metric, or maybe weight isn't an appropriate metric when taken in isolation.
Perhaps if it were weight correlated with mood, diet, time (of month? day? year?) or various life events then it'd be worthwhile.
Perhaps sending a text: "110kg :S pizza" indicating you're 110kg, feeling stressed and the last thing you ate was pizza.
If the "request for information" SMS were sent out at some sort of "random sampling" time, then you could probably build some sort of useful statistical model based on mood and food consumption correlating to fluctuations in weight then use the feedback to reduce weight over time.