Fat thickness measurement using optical technique with miniaturized chip LEDs: a preliminary human study.

In this study, we present the possibility of the fat thickness measurement using the miniaturized chip LEDs sensor module for the twelve healthy women. The newly developed sensor module consisted of four different source-detector distances. The measurement sites are the five parts of biceps, triceps, upper abdomen, front thigh, and calf and the range of fat thickness is from 3.5 mm to 39.0 mm. The fitting curve for each measurement sites is separately obtained. We obtained the correlation coefficient of 0.932 compared with the fat thickness of CT measurement for biceps site. For the three measurement sites of biceps, front thigh, and calf of twelve persons and namely 36 data points, the mean absolute difference thickness and % error for the measured thickness compared with that of reference CT thickness are 1.08 mm and 11.49%, respectively. Based on this preliminary experiment, it is confirmed that the fat thickness measurement is possible with proper curve fitting procedure using slope analysis.