BioSense – Non-Invasive Body Composition Analyzer

Abstract

One of the major determinant of human health is the lifestyle which is primarily based on how a person lives, his working, eating and sleeping habits. In addition, factors such as diet, exercise, consumption of tobacco, alcohol or drugs play a major role in influencing health and wellbeing as well as the risk of chronic diseases. According to WHO, 60% of factors related to individual health and quality of life are correlated to lifestyle. [1] Millions of people follow an unhealthy lifestyle. Hence, they encounter illness, disability and face problems like metabolic and cardio-vascular diseases, joint and skeletal problems, hypertension and obesity. Understanding what drives these choices and how they affect health are key challenges for the society. Researchers, doctors and nutritionists are trying to develop effective ways to modify the behaviors of diverse social, cultural and economic populations. In recent years, rising trend of health conscious practices is observed at global as well as national level. However, this opens up a question as to what extent adopting a healthy lifestyle is really serving the purpose of staying fit? Looking healthy doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually healthy. This creates a need for a health monitor in the market which keeps people informed about their bodies and what do they require to function properly and stay healthy. Generally, in daily life, two metrics are used to measure health and level of fitness. One is weight which tells more about the apparent fitness only. While the other indicator is BMI which gives a relatively detailed picture of human health and level of fitness. However, cases in past show that BMI alone can be misleading. This point was proven by a research study conducted at UCLA according to which 54M Americans were incorrectly categorized as unhealthy based on BMI alone. [3] A number of other studies have established the fact that BMI cannot distinguish between fat and muscle and cannot be considered a reliable health indicator. Keeping these facts and considerations in mind, the need of an apparatus which gives an accurate picture of a person’s body composition and fitness level became apparent and with that emerged the idea of BioSense. BioSense is a non-invasive body composition analyzer that gives a calculated measure of total body water, fat and muscle mass. It provides the user with an explicit view of body composition as per the defined health standards. Body composition is the proportion of fat and fat-free mass in the body which is measured to assess health and fitness levels. For the past few decades, number of scientists and researchers have been working on finding and validating techniques and developing prediction equations for determination of body composition levels. Presently various body composition analyzers are available in foreign market but they are quite expensive and are not easily accessible to the local population.