Body Fat is an important health statistic. Whether you are a person who dreams of obtaining “rock-hard” abs on the beach, a person aiming to shed a couple of pounds for the new year, a doctor assessing a patient’s risk of cardiac arrest, or just a general fitness enthusiast, body fat is the rave of today’s exercise culture. Although there is a negative connotation associated with body fat, it is an essential nutrient. Fats are needed to boost energy levels and numerous metabolic processes. Generally, a healthy individual is considered to have a body fat value in the range of 18-25%. However, excessive fat levels have shown a positive correlation with mortality.
Historically, body mass index (BMI) has been used more often by doctors to evaluate a person’s overall fitness. But a health study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition determined that an individual’s body fat is more effective in assessing his/her risk of developing chronic disease than BMI due to the failure of the latter in differentiating between fat-free mass (bone, water, lean tissue) and the weight of fat mass in the body. An individual may be on the lower end of the obesity spectrum in terms of total weight, but still possess an enormous risk of cardiovascular diseases due to having too much body fat.
Based on these facts, one could argue that healthcare professionals should deviate from the practice of collecting patient’s BMIs and focus their attention solely on calculating patients’ body fat percentage. However, measuring an individual’s body fat is an arduous process due to the amount of time need to procure data and make calculations, which require a good understanding of topics such as calculus. and conversation of mass (nasty math/physics). For that reason, BMI is more commonly used despite the lower confidence in this data. Thus, there is a high demand for technology that can assess an individual’s body fat percentage in an accurate and timely manner.
Air Displacement Plethysmography is an emerging technology that utilizes air perturbations that occur when a subject enters a confined space in order to determine their body fat levels. Please click here to view figures collected from a US patent filed for the BodPod: an air plethysmographic apparatus manufactured by Life Measurements Instruments, a medical device company based in Concord, California.
The Bod Pod consists of an air circulation system (represented by item 60 on figure 2) linked to a plethysmographic measurement chamber (pointed out by item 50 on figure 2). The air circulation system (embodied in greater detail by Fig 3 of the patent), comprised of one or more pumps, acts as both a source of circulation and filtration within the chamber by using ambient air (air that is derived from a temperature-enclosed environment). Clean air is pumped into the chamber via an inlet tube (represented by item 86) while contaminated air is moved out of the chamber through an outlet tube (represented by item 88), where it is later filtered and recycled. The result is a clean and controlled air environment that is maintained throughout the duration of the BodPod’s operation. Inside of the Bod Pod are plethysmographic measurement components(represented by item 56 and 58 on Figure 2) that record perturbations in the volume of air inside the chamber before and after a subject enters in order to calculate the subject’s body volume by subtraction. For those who aren’t familiar, a plethysmograph is an instrument that measures displacements in a fluid within an enclosed environment (in this case, the BodPod chamber). In order to gather accurate data, it is imperative that the volume of air in the chamber is recorded before a subject enters the chamber. Once all data has been collected, it is wirelessly transmitted to a computer for further analysis using software provided by Life Instruments. Once the subject’s body volume has been determined, it is immediately inserted into Siri’s Equation to calculate the subject’s body fat percentage.
References
Dempster Phillip, Michael Homer, and Mark Lowe (2004). United States Patent 20040193074 A1. Retrieved from https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/93/cf/ea/6d2d1346ea1129/US20040193074A1.pdf
