Design and Development of Portable Body Composition Analyzer for Children.

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this study was (i) to design and develop a portable BCA device for measuring body composition parameters such as body weight, body fat (BF) %, total body water (TBW), fat-free mass (FFM), muscle mass (MM), and bone mass (BM); (ii) to validate the developed portable BCA with the Tanita MC 980 MA BCA device.

METHODS

For this current study, two hundred healthy and obese subjects, whose ages ranged from 8 to 12 years (8.4 ± 1.7), were considered.

RESULTS

The highest percentage difference between the two study groups was found to be in BFat (50.39%), followed by body mass index (BMI) (41.73 kg), FFM (38.32 kg), and MM (37.89 kg), and this was found to be statistically significant. The results obtained from the designed prototype of the body composition analyzer were validated using Tanita MC 980MA BCA. The overall error% was calculated as ±3% for measuring the different body composition parameters.

CONCLUSIONS

Due to its low standard error and high overall accuracy, the BCA prototype demonstrates the potential to be a dependable instrument for evaluating and tracking the body composition of children.