Allegedly a current is passed up one leg and down the other and the speed of transmission indicates your percentage of body fat.
I would expect the current to take the shortest route - that is, up one leg, across your groin area and down the other leg.
I'm not sure how this can measure the amount of fat in your arms, thorax and abdomen.
Anyone know how accurate these things are?
Cheers
Dave R
Um no.
I believe that your legs behave like a couple of insulated capacitors (conductor surrounded by insulator (fat). The fat percentage is based on their capacitance, not conductivity. I?m sure you could find chapter and verse online if you were sufficiently interested.
It can?t. It just uses a ?look up? table based on age, height, sex and leg capacitance to come up with a ballpark figure.
Not very. No doubt some are better than others. Probably more useful to monitor trends than for absolute figures but my own experience after losing about 25lbs was that my body fat percentage didn?t change.
Tim
Sounds like rubbish to me. I measured using a high impedance meter the resistance of my body between various points years ago and even drinking a few glasses of water an hour earlier changes it. Also everyone is different as you say. This was not designed by the same guy as the bomb detector was it? Next week a device to measure intelligence by measuring the current between your ears? Brian
We have a couple (identical model, Omron KaradaScan BF511). These have feet and hand electrodes. They report weight/BMI, percentage body fat, percentage body muscle, visceral fat (an arbitrary figure ranging 0-30), and your resting metabolic rate (how many calories your body needs per day with no exercise). These have no data link or cloud connection - you have to copy the data off if you want to keep it. They remember the previous reading per person, and handle up to 4 people (and a guest for which no history is kept as it is assumed to be a different person each time). One slight pain is these only work reliably on hard floors. On a carpet, even very short pile, the feet sink in and wrong parts make floor contact, giving wrong readings. The floor not being flat doesn't seem to be any problem though.
I use them every day and results go into an Excel spreadsheet. I graph them and you can easily see how much noise there is in the measurements versus the general trend. Noise is not just due to measurement inaccuracies, but will also depend how much you've eaten, drunk, and lost via toilet and perspiration recently, versus the other readings you are comparing against. You minimise the latter by measuring in the same circumstances as far as possible, e.g. I take measurement after I've woken and been to the loo, but before any exercise or breakfast. When you plot many day's readings, you can see what the noise bars are.
Measurements are consistant in that if I measure a few times in succession, I get similar results. (Weight is always the same, variation in fat and muscle composition is quite small, visceral fat always the same but it's a lower resolution figure.) The two scales report the same figures, so no variation between them. My figures are pretty flat line over time, but small trends track exactly what I would expect, e.g. a raise in body fat for the few days around Christmas when I eat more and didn't exercise.
Other family members have used them occasionally, and the results pretty much match what I would expect (and significantly different from mine in some cases), so it's not just reporting some average figures for body fat and muscle percentages.
Different makes of body composition scales will report significantly different figures, but that's to be expected, particularly if they have different electrode positions. I did try the coin-op ones in Boots before I bought these, and didn't find them very consistant. I didn't want ones which link to cloud or mobile apps, because I tend to keep things like this longer than any of those platforms maintain support, but some collegues do have cloud/app based ones. One laughed out loud at work one day when a reading popped up on his phone at a time when his cleaner was at home - she was quite a bit heavier than he would have guessed...
I suppose it depends if you are big boned or fat. Most fat people believe they are big boned.
Fever?
+2 ;-)
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